Software Engineer, Data & AI Platform (m/f/x)

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 are looking for an Engineer with strong data engineering and AI systems experience to build the data, evaluation, and observability foundation for production-grade LLM agents used in complex audit workflows.

This role sits at the intersection of backend engineering, data engineering, AI infrastructure, and LLM operations . You will work hands-on in our backend and agent architecture, building the systems that help us evaluate, monitor, debug, optimize, and continuously improve AI agents in production.

This is not a traditional analytics, BI, or dashboarding role. You should expect to write production code, design infrastructure, work inside backend systems, and directly improve the quality, cost, reliability, and performance of LLM-based agents.

What you’ll do

You will help building and operating the technical infrastructure around our AI agents, with a focus on data infrastructure, evaluation, observability, and optimization. Your work will include:

• Building online and offline evaluation systems for LLM agents, including pipelines that use golden datasets, ground-truth data, human review workflows, and experiment results.

• Creating automated quality gates so changes to prompts, context, models, or agent logic can be tested before reaching production.

• Analyzing large volumes of agent traces and executions to identify failure modes, quality regressions, latency issues, reliability gaps, and cost optimization opportunities.

• Working with columnar data stores and analytical databases such as BigQuery, ClickHouse, or similar technologies.

• Building reliable data retention and replay mechanisms for long-term analysis of production agent behaviour.

• Creating observability tooling for trace analysis, experiment monitoring, production dashboards, logging, tracing, and debugging.

• Working inside our core backend and agent architecture, including building new agents or improving existing agents when needed.

Qualifications

You will fit into this role if you:

• Have strong Python and/or backend engineering experience.

• Have strong SQL skills and are comfortable working with large datasets.

• Have deployed and operated systems in the cloud, ideally on GCP.

• Have practical experience designing data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, event-processing systems, or feedback loops for production data.

• Are comfortable working with analytical databases, data warehouses, columnar stores, and high-volume event or trace data.

• Understand system design, reliability, observability, monitoring, logging, debugging, and operational trade-offs.

• Can work in complex existing systems and quickly build a mental model of how they operate.

• Bring senior-level engineering judgment: you can make architectural decisions, communicate trade-offs, and build systems that other engineers can extend.

• Are comfortable with ambiguity, able to reason from first principles, and excited to build infrastructure for AI systems that are actively used in production.

Nice-to-haves that are a plus:

• Building infrastructure around LLM-based products or agentic systems, including optimizing LLM usage, context windows, reasoning tokens, or model selection.

• Working with production traces from complex distributed systems.

• Building internal platforms for engineers, domain experts, or operations teams.

• Using workflow orchestration systems such as Temporal or similar.

• Familiarity with audit, finance, compliance, or other high-accuracy domains.

• Experience in an early-stage startup or fast-moving engineering environment.

No one checks every box. If you’ve shipped retrieval systems and like owning evaluations and pipelines, let’s talk.

What we offer

• High impact & growth: Shape strategy at a scaling AI startup from day one

• Mission-driven culture: Ambitious team valuing first-principles thinking and bold ideas

• Attractive compensation: competitive salary plus significant equity

• Personal development: Learning budget for courses and conferences

• Startup perks: Flexible vacation, team lunches, retreats, central Berlin office

Interview process

• First Call — Intro to Cortea with our Talent Partner Adriana

• Second Call — Technical interview with Jendrik

• Third Call — Deep dive into our culture with our Co-Founder Philipp

• On-site Day (Berlin) — Meet the team and work on a real problem together

We’re an equal-opportunity team and encourage women and underrepresented groups to apply.