Head of Engineering at Clera — Berlin, Germany

About The Role

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is a player-coach Head of Engineering role at an early-stage B2B SaaS company in the construction technology and AI space. You will work directly with the founders to own the technical direction end-to-end, from infrastructure and architecture through to building and mentoring a team of five senior engineers. The role carries real hands-on responsibility alongside strategic leadership, making it a strong fit for someone who wants both depth and breadth of impact.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Own the technical roadmap and architecture evolution, setting code quality standards and team processes.
Make pragmatic decisions at the intersection of speed and quality across the full stack and infrastructure.
Drive technical vision for core platform capabilities including data lineage, document processing at scale, AI evaluation pipelines, and semantic search.
Work hands-on architecting and implementing complex features alongside the engineering team.
Make foundational stack decisions across TypeScript, Fastify, Python, Postgres, AWS, and AI integrations.
Hire, mentor, and develop a small senior engineering team while defining hiring standards that scale.
Build a high-feedback, low-ego engineering culture where ownership and growth are the norm.
Partner with founders on product-engineering strategy and represent engineering in external conversations.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Around 10 or more years of B2B SaaS full-stack development experience, including enterprise contexts.
Proven track record scaling systems through multiple infrastructure iterations and managing technical debt at scale.
Significant engineering leadership experience managing at least one team in a B2B SaaS environment.
Experience scaling a B2B SaaS company from early stage (0 to 10 employees) with hands-on technical contributions.
Hands-on fluency with TypeScript, modern web frameworks, and backend API design.
Experience architecting data pipelines, document processing systems, or similarly data-intensive platforms.
Solid cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure) covering databases, storage, and deployment automation.
Experience integrating AI/ML systems into production applications or evaluating model performance.
Background at a strong early-stage or growth-stage startup, with exposure to engineering excellence and still driven to build.
Entrepreneurial or ex-founder background is a strong plus.
Experience with Python, observability tooling, or enterprise system integrations (ERP, procurement platforms) is advantageous.
Fluent English communication skills, written and spoken.
Based in Berlin or willing to relocate for a fully on-site role.