Staff Engineer
About the Role
This is a founding-level Staff Engineer opportunity at a Y Combinator-backed AI sales automation startup, where you'll serve as the technical backbone of a small, fast-moving engineering team. You'll own the highest-leverage systems across multiple products - from core infrastructure to AI capabilities - and play a defining role in how the engineering organisation scales. The work is hands-on, high-impact, and deeply cross-functional.
What You'll Do
Own the most complex, highest-leverage engineering work: core systems, shared frameworks, and critical infrastructure across multiple products.
Define and evolve architecture decisions that prevent long-term dead-ends as the product portfolio grows.
Spend the majority of your time writing and shipping production code, leading by example.
Eliminate technical debt by refactoring abstractions and raising the bar on reliability and engineering standards.
Mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and direct feedback to improve team output and reduce hidden risk.
Contribute to the architecture and implementation of AI capabilities, including LLM pipelines and data infrastructure.
What We're Looking For
8+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of solving genuinely hard technical problems in production.
Deep full-stack expertise with strong backend, API, and infrastructure skills; comfortable on the frontend when needed (Python, React, TypeScript).
Proven experience designing and evolving systems across multiple products and teams, including long-term architectural strategy.
Cloud and DevOps fluency: containerisation (Docker), cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
Demonstrated ability to improve system performance, reliability, and scalability at scale.
Experience building or integrating AI systems, LLMs, or large-scale data pipelines is a strong plus.
A hands-on technical leader who mentors by doing and multiplies team effectiveness.
Mission-driven, pragmatic, and decisive under uncertainty - comfortable with the intensity and pace of an early-stage startup.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: €80,000 - €130,000 per year. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. In-person presence is expected.