About the Position

Senior/Staff Platform Engineer (m/f/x)

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior/Staff Platform Engineer to join our team at Cortea AI in Berlin, Germany. In this role, you will be instrumental in shaping the architecture of our AI-driven platform, ensuring reliability and scalability as we continue to grow.

Responsibilities

Product Platform: Make the easiest way for product engineers to do something (the paved road, or golden path) also the most secure, reliable, and scalable way by default. Build the shared primitives, libraries, and APIs that hide complexity and carry our quality and observability standards with them.
Infrastructure, Observability, and Reliability: Infrastructure as code by default, from cloud resources through to dashboards and alerts. Provision, run, and tune our Kubernetes cluster and cloud footprint, and keep CI fast as the deploy rate grows. Define SLIs for the workloads that matter, build SLOs on top of them, and make the alerting high-signal enough that people trust it.
Security and Compliance: Keep the internal foundations secure by default: IAM, dependency management, secrets. Own the authentication and authorization stack, including ReBAC models covering both humans and agents. Implement SOC 2 and ISO 27001 controls without taxing every future change.
AI Dev Tooling: Keep product engineers and their agents on the paved road by making sure the documentation and agent guidelines they need are in place. Shorten the path from design to implementation with standardized automations and development environments that stay close to production.

Requirements

Designed, built, and operated distributed systems end to end.
Strong at backend software engineering and at DevOps/SRE.
Experience with writing design docs, RFCs, ADRs, postmortems.
Ability to reach for simple, boring solutions first, can tell essential complexity from accidental, and know which corners are safe to cut and which ones compound.
Experience with scaling Postgres or another relational transactional database under real load, running production Kubernetes, and building observability: SLIs, SLOs, distributed tracing.

Nice to Have

Experience with durable workflow orchestrators like Temporal, and background job and queue processing.
Infrastructure for LLM-based products or agentic systems.
Experience in audit, finance, compliance, or another high-accuracy domain.
Experience with Azure and/or GCP.

What We Offer

Ownership and Influence: You own the brand and shape how the product feels. Work face-to-face with experienced founders and learn directly from customer insights. Real influence on strategy in a small team of excellent engineers and operators with high autonomy.
Ambitious and Fun Team: Decisions get made in hours, not weeks. Rapid experimentation is the default.
Competitive Compensation: Meaningful equity and a competitive salary. You are one of the first to build this, and you share in the upside.
Meaningful Mission: Building intelligent systems for a $200bn industry. From Berlin, with AI at the core.

Interview Process

First Call - Intro to Cortea with Liza
Second Call - Technical interview with Dan
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

About the Company

Cortea AI is at the forefront of developing intelligent systems for a $200bn industry. Based in Berlin, we are committed to building reliable, scalable, and secure AI-driven platforms. Join us to shape the future of AI and make a significant impact.

Senior/Staff Platform Engineer (m/f/x)

Job description