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