Staff Engineer

About the Role This is a founding Staff Engineer position at a seed-stage AI sales automation startup, where you will serve as the technical backbone of a small, fast-moving engineering team. You will own the highest-leverage systems across multiple products, set architectural direction, and raise the bar on quality, reliability, and AI capabilities. The role is deeply hands-on and carries outsized impact at an early stage. What You'll Do - Own the most complex engineering work across core systems, shared frameworks, and critical infrastructure. - Define and evolve architecture decisions that prevent long-term dead-ends across multiple products. - Spend the majority of your time writing and shipping production code, leading by example. - Eliminate technical debt by refactoring abstractions and raising engineering and reliability standards. - Mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and direct feedback to improve team output and reduce hidden risk. - Contribute to the architecture and implementation of AI capabilities, including LLM pipelines and data infrastructure. What We're Looking For - 8 or more years of software engineering experience with a track record of solving genuinely hard technical problems in production. - Deep full-stack expertise, with strong backend, API, and infrastructure skills; comfortable on the frontend when needed. - Proficiency across the core stack: Python, React, and TypeScript. - Cloud and DevOps fluency covering containerization (Docker), at least one major cloud platform (Azure, AWS, or GCP), and infrastructure as code (Terraform). - Proven ownership of architecture decisions across multiple products or teams. - Demonstrated improvements to production system performance, reliability, and scalability. - Experience mentoring engineers and providing technical guidance through hands-on leadership. - Experience building or integrating AI systems, LLMs, or large-scale data pipelines is a strong plus. - Willingness to work on-site in Munich in a high-intensity, startup environment. Compensation & Benefits Salary range: 80,000 to 130,000 EUR annually . Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. Location On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany . This role requires full-time presence in the office.