Data & AI Engineer (m/f/d)

About JUNI

JUNI is building the leading startup ecosystem for science-based spin-offs in Berlin and Brandenburg. We connect universities, startups, corporates, investors and policymakers, and create the spaces, programmes and partnerships that translate research into successful companies.

That work produces data in many places: our own tools, our science partners, publications and patents, investors and talent. We are building JUNI Core, a central data platform that brings this together and feeds the tools our teams work with. We are looking for a Data & AI Engineer who owns this data layer long term: the pipelines, the data model, and the AI methods that make the data useful.

You report directly to our Head of Product & Tech and work closely with our Technical Product Manager and our IT & operations specialist.

Your mission

Data platform

• Taking ownership of JUNI Core: the integration of all source systems, the data model and its operation
• Building and running pipelines between our tools and the platform, in both directions
• Keeping data reliable: one clear source for every field, syncs that don't create duplicates, alerts when something breaks
• Adding new sources as they come and deciding how each fits the model

Data for our ecosystem tools

• Working out with the Product & Tech team which data JUNI needs, where it comes from and what we may use it for
• Building the data foundations for new tools in our ecosystem work
• Bringing in external data such as publications, patents or company data via APIs and scraping, and linking it to what we already know
• Making sure users can see where a result comes from

AI and data quality

• Using LLMs and embeddings for matching, classification and enrichment, with evaluation built in
• Defining what good output means per use case: acceptable error rates, reference cases, and what happens when a result is wrong
• Working with the Technical Product Manager and topic owners on what is worth automating
• Documentation and tests as part of the work, not after it

Your profile

• 4+ years as Data Engineer or Data Scientist, with pipelines and automations you have built and run in production
• Strong in SQL and Postgres
• Comfortable in Python for data work: pandas, notebooks, evaluation scripts
• Experience integrating SaaS tools via APIs and webhooks, including sync in both directions
• Practical experience with LLMs in data pipelines: embeddings, structured extraction, evaluation
• Experience with matching, classification or ranking methods, and how to measure whether they work
• You check what an API actually does instead of trusting its documentation
• You design with GDPR in mind: consent, retention, access
• You use Claude Code or similar AI coding tools daily and know where their output needs a hard review
• Experience with record linkage or entity resolution is a plus
• Fluent English; German is a plus

We offer

• A role with real ownership: JUNI's data platform and the data behind our tools are yours to shape
• Work that matters for science-based founders, researchers and our partners across Berlin-Brandenburg
• A motivated team with a hands-on spirit and flat hierarchies
• Flexible working hours and hybrid working
• A modern working environment in the heart of Berlin
• Compensation that reflects experience and responsibility