Founding Engineer at Clera — Berlin, Germany

About The Role

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a founding engineering role at an early-stage AI startup building purpose-built agents for the sea and air freight industry. You will sit at the intersection of customer engagement and product development, helping shape both the technical architecture and the company's strategic direction from the ground up.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Lead customer conversations and translate insights directly into product features and tech strategy.
Design and build full-stack applications while pushing the AI capabilities of the product forward.
Transition the product from demo and prototype stage into scalable, production-ready systems.
Shape the direction of the product, the technical architecture, and the company as a whole.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

2+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production applications.
Full-stack development skills: Node.js, TypeScript, and React on the frontend; Python on the backend.
Hands-on experience with LLM design patterns, vector stores, and model fine-tuning.
Broad product-engineering range rather than a profile concentrated primarily in ML, data, frontend, or analytics.
Experience designing, building, and deploying scalable products from MVP to production.
Demonstrated ability to lead customer conversations and translate feedback into product requirements.
Background in startup or early-stage environments, comfortable with fast iteration and ambiguity.
Strong system-design ability: can move beyond abstractions, reason about scope and constraints, and make startup-appropriate trade-offs without over-engineering.
Experience with vector databases or semantic search is a plus.