Staff Engineer at Clera — Munich, Germany

About The Role

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a founding Staff Engineer position at a seed-stage AI SaaS startup building automation tools for inside sales workflows in distribution and manufacturing. You will serve as the technical backbone of a small, fast-moving engineering team, owning high-leverage systems across multiple products and setting the standard for quality, reliability, and AI capabilities.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Own the most complex, highest-leverage engineering work: core systems, shared frameworks, and critical infrastructure.
Define and evolve architecture decisions across multiple products to prevent long-term technical dead-ends.
Spend the majority of your time writing and shipping production code, leading by example.
Eliminate technical debt by refactoring abstractions and raising reliability and engineering 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+ 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 (Python, React, TypeScript).
Proven experience designing and evolving systems across multiple products and teams.
Demonstrated ability to improve system performance, reliability, and scalability at scale.
Cloud and DevOps fluency: containerization (Docker), cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
Experience building or integrating AI systems, LLMs, or large-scale data pipelines is a strong plus.
A hands-on technical leader who mentors by doing and multiplies team effectiveness.
Mission-driven, pragmatic, and decisive; comfortable working with intensity in a high-growth startup environment.