Senior/Staff Product Engineer (m/f/x)
Cortea AI
<h1>About us</h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">We’re <strong>Cortea</strong>, a Berlin startup <strong>transforming audits with AI</strong>. Manual, document-heavy audits waste expert time while demand keeps rising. Our <strong>AI-powered software and specialized AI agents</strong> remove the repetitive work so auditors can focus on judgment. </p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Backed by top-tier VCs with >15m funding, with a working product and paying customers, we’re rapidly scaling.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">We value <strong>first-principles thinking, speed, trust, and kindness</strong>. We build side by side <strong>in our Berlin office</strong>.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h2>Your Role</h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">We're looking for an <strong>experienced engineer who's happy anywhere in the stack</strong> and turns complex audit workflows into product auditors rely on every day. You pick up whatever a problem needs, from the data model to the interface to the agents behind it.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">A lot of what we build has no reference implementation. You're <strong>comfortable wading into something nobody has solved yet</strong> and shipping a first version that actually works.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Our engineering team is a <strong>small, flat group of builders</strong>: strong ICs who open a laptop when they see a problem instead of scheduling a meeting. Everyone owns real product and architecture decisions, and that's exactly what we want more of.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h2>What you'll do</h2><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Build the interfaces auditors work in, partnering with design to turn complex flows into something that feels effortless</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Build and improve the agents at the core of the product, plus the harnesses and eval pipelines around them</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Make the long-running workflows behind the product reliable and debuggable, so failures surface fast instead of silently</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Use AI heavily in your own workflow to move faster, without ever shipping output you can't stand behind</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Drive the how in RFCs and technical discussions with other engineers, and partner with product on the what</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h2>Qualifications</h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">You'll fit here if you:</p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Have 5+ years shipping production web applications across the stack</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Write production APIs and model the data behind them so it holds up under multi-tenancy and load</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Are strong on the frontend and can build genuinely complex UI</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Get how LLM agents actually work: agents, harnesses, tool use, and measuring quality with evals</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Keep up with where AI is moving and bring the latest tools into how you work to make yourself faster</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Bring a strong product mindset and real ownership of outcomes</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Make architectural decisions, weigh trade-offs, and build things other engineers can extend</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Are comfortable with ambiguity and work things out from fundamentals when there's no established answer</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em">Nice-to-haves that are a plus:</p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Hands-on experience building agents, harnesses, or eval pipelines</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Data-dense or workflow-heavy B2B products</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Scaling multi-tenant systems as data and traffic grow</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Audit, finance, compliance, or another domain where being wrong is expensive</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Early-stage startup or fast-moving engineering environment</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>No one checks every box. If you ship across frontend, backend, and data and own what you build, let's talk.</strong></p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h2>Our tech</h2><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">React, TS, Tailwind, TanStack</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Python, Postgres, Temporal, Kafka, Redis</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">GCP, Azure, k8s</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">GitHub, Linear, Slack, Notion</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1><strong>What We Offer</strong></h1><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>High impact & growth:</strong> Front-row seat to scaling an AI startup with real ownership from day one</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Mission-driven culture:</strong> First-principles thinking, bold ideas, and a supportive team</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Attractive compensation:</strong> competitive salary + meaningful equity</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Personal development:</strong> Learning budget for courses and conferences</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>True Berlin startup environment:</strong> Central Berlin office, team lunches, retreats, flexible vacation</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p></li></ul><h1><strong>Interview process</strong></h1><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>First Call</strong> — Intro to Cortea with our Founders Associate Liza</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Second Call</strong> — Technical interview with our Member of Technical Staff Jendrik</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Third Call</strong> — Deep dive into our culture with our Co-Founder Philipp</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>On-site Half-Day (Berlin) </strong>— Meet the team and work on a real problem together</p></li></ul><h2></h2><div style="text-align:left"><img style="max-width:100%" src="https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/316125b8-3855-479e-a082-a30caf346d45/1ddbeed3-b4e6-4a47-8872-d5cfeee3e842/image.png" /></div><p>Find more <a href="https://www.arbeitnow.com/english-speaking-jobs">English Speaking Jobs in Germany</a> on Arbeitnow</a>