Staff Engineer
About the Role
This is a founding Staff Engineer position at a seed-stage AI SaaS startup automating quote and order processing for distributors and manufacturers. You will serve as the technical backbone of a small, fast-moving engineering team, owning high-leverage systems across multiple products and setting the technical standard for the entire organization.
What You'll Do
Own the most complex and highest-leverage engineering work, including core systems, shared frameworks, and critical infrastructure.
Define and evolve architecture decisions across products to prevent long-term technical dead-ends.
Spend the majority of your time writing and shipping production code, leading by example.
Eliminate technical debt by refactoring abstractions and raising 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 ownership of architecture across multiple products or teams, with demonstrated improvements to performance, reliability, and scalability.
Cloud and DevOps fluency: containerization (Docker), major cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
Hands-on technical leadership style, mentoring through doing rather than through management alone.
Experience building or integrating AI systems, LLMs, or large-scale data pipelines is a strong plus.
Comfortable working in a high-intensity, in-person startup environment.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: 80,000 to 130,000 EUR annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. In-person presence is required.