Founding Principal Engineer (m/f/d)

What you bring

• Platforms you've built and run. You've built backend platforms from scratch and run them in production, through outages, data incidents, migrations and growth.
• Database depth. You know what happens under the query: indexing, locking, transactions, replication, zero-downtime schema changes, and backups you've actually restored.
• Security by default. Authentication and authorisation, tenant isolation, secrets, audit logging. You think about how a system gets attacked before it ships.
• Identity done properly. Identity providers, sessions and tokens, roles and permissions, onboarding and offboarding.
• Infrastructure. Infrastructure as code, containers, Linux, networking and cloud are everyday tools for you.
• Beyond the backend. The backend is your home, but when the product needs it, you read and change the app yourself.
• Systematic troubleshooting. You reproduce first and fix root causes. You work from evidence like logs, traces, metrics and query plans, and you stay calm when production breaks.
• AI-native engineering. Coding agents are part of your daily work. You give them good context, split work into reviewable steps, and stand behind every line you ship.
• Ownership. You help shape the roadmap, push back on weak ideas, set your own priorities and raise problems early. Nobody has to chase you. Strong opinions, held with evidence and open to revision.
• Range. You've worked across several companies, stacks or environments. How you work counts far more than how many years you've done it.

Nice to have

• Regulated environments with audits: medical devices, health, finance.
• Serving ML models in production.

What we offer

• Ownership from day one. As a founding engineer, you're part of the company through our virtual share option plan (VSOP).
• You grow with us. As the company grows, your role grows with it.
• Real influence. You decide how we build software, and you shape the engineering team we build.
• A competitive salary.
• A product that matters: a medical device for real clinics, built together with clinicians and lab staff.
• Flexible hours and office days. We work from Berlin and meet in person regularly, up to several days a week. This isn't a fully remote role.
• English is our working language. German isn't required.
• We sponsor the EU Blue Card if you're moving to Berlin.

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Source: Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis), table; dl-de/by-2-0; StarIn's calculation

Posted Nov 01, 2026