Senior/Staff Product Engineer (m/f/x)

Job description

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