Senior/Staff Product Engineer (m/f/x)
About this role
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
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