Staff Engineer

Description

The company is an AI-native supplier of industrial materials and goods for energy and infrastructure. It runs trade and distribution end to end, buying and selling on its own account, with the aim of becoming the supplier of record for the whole industry.

European industrial procurement is a €900B market and the largest manual one in the world. 95% of customers have no direct route into global supply chains. Goods often pass through four or five middlemen before they reach a site, and 40% of the margin is lost along the way. Until now, people handled sourcing, negotiation, financing, shipping and sales.

The company buys from global sources and sells to European customers. Its AI covers sourcing, quality, pricing, sales, logistics, credit and financing. Customers send one request, receive a firm quote within minutes, and get on-time delivery. There are no warehouses, no fleet and no inventory risk, and every trade is sold before it is bought.

The company is also the credit counterparty. Customers are scored and insured within minutes and can receive up to 60 days of payment terms built into the quote. Working capital is bank-funded rather than equity-funded.

Current status: a triple-digit-million euro turnover run rate, mostly from repeat customers; seven European markets live, supplied from Asia and beyond; 80+ people in Berlin (HQ), London and Shanghai; $90M raised in equity and debt, including a $40M Series B led by Atomico, Project A, Target Global and Inven Capital, plus working capital facilities from UniCredit and KfW.

Global trade runs end to end inside the company, and AI agents already handle a growing share of it. Order values are high and prices and stock move daily, so the systems must stay fast, correct and reliable at all times.

The Staff Engineer owns the hardest technical problems and sets architecture across teams, with a focus on speed, reliability, security and observability. The role reports to the VP Engineering and works closely with Senior Product Engineers, QA and product managers. The work stays hands-on: writing code, reviewing designs and raising the engineering bar.

Tech stack: Java 21 and Spring Boot 3, Python, LangGraph and LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini), PostgreSQL, Kinesis, AWS with Terraform, GitHub Actions, and TypeScript with Node.js, Next.js and React. The team also works with Salesforce, which the company is moving its transaction core out of.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction across teams: define the target architecture, write RFCs for major decisions, and keep every team working toward the same picture.
• Take on the hardest technical work yourself, from design through to production, rather than only advising.
• Shape the move of the transaction core out of Salesforce into a modern, modular system, with a migration path that keeps daily trading running.
• Build reliability, security and observability into everyday delivery: monitoring, alerting, incident response and postmortems that lead to real change.
• Design how AI agents act safely on paths that touch money, using evaluations, guardrails, audit trails and human review where it counts.
• Set standards for correctness and data integrity, including idempotency, validation and testing, together with QA.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and direct feedback, and help hiring by defining what strong engineering looks like at the company.
• In your first six months, you might:
• Design a pricing engine architecture that scales with a growing range of products and markets, and serves correct prices to sales and later directly to customers in milliseconds.
• Lay out the target architecture and first steps for moving the transaction core off Salesforce.
• Set up observability and incident handling so problems are caught before customers or colleagues notice them.

Requirements

• At least 8 years building and running production software, including systems where errors cost real money.
• Strong production-scale backend skills in Java or a similar language such as Kotlin, C or Go, and willingness to work in Java and Spring Boot.
• A record of setting architecture across several teams through influence rather than a management title.
• Experience designing transactional, distributed and event-driven systems, with close attention to correctness, failure modes and performance.
• Hands-on depth in reliability, security and observability, and experience leading incidents and postmortems.
• Experience at a fast-growing company and a track record of solving business problems, not just technical ones.
• You use AI every day. Building or evaluating AI agents in production is a strong plus.
• Experience re-platforming or carving systems out of a platform such as Salesforce or an ERP is a plus.

Conditions

Working language: English.

Start date: as soon as possible.

The company is an equal-opportunity employer and welcomes applicants of every background, whatever their race, ethnicity, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability or other characteristic.

Benefits

• A learning budget for your development.