Senior/Staff Product Engineer (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'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