Founding Engineer
Clera · Berlin, BE
FULL-TIME
Posted Sep 13, 2026
Job Description
About The Role
This is a founding-level engineering role at an early-stage AI startup building purpose-built automation for the sea and air freight industry. You will sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success, helping take the product from demo-stage to a scalable, production-ready system that freight forwarders rely on daily. Your work will directly shape the company's technical and product direction from the ground up.
What You'll Do
- Lead customer conversations and translate insights into concrete product features and technical strategy.
- Design, build, and ship full-stack applications using Node.js, TypeScript, React, and Python.
- Push the AI capabilities of the product forward, including LLM design patterns, vector stores, and model fine-tuning.
- Transition the product from prototype and demo mode into a scalable, high-quality production system.
- Contribute to shaping the product roadmap, architecture decisions, and overall company direction.
What We're Looking For
- 2 or more 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.
- Experience designing and deploying scalable products from MVP through to production.
- Comfort leading customer conversations and turning feedback into clear product requirements.
- Strong system-design ability, including reasoning about scope, constraints, and trade-offs in a startup context.
- Experience in startup or early-stage environments, with a bias toward pragmatic, startup-appropriate architecture decisions.
- Broad product-engineering range rather than a background concentrated in a single discipline such as ML, data, or frontend.
- Bonus: experience with vector databases, semantic search, or transitioning products from prototype to production.
Location
Hybrid from Berlin, Germany. Visa sponsorship is available.
This is a founding-level engineering role at an early-stage AI startup building purpose-built automation for the sea and air freight industry. You will sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success, helping take the product from demo-stage to a scalable, production-ready system that freight forwarders rely on daily. Your work will directly shape the company's technical and product direction from the ground up.
What You'll Do
- Lead customer conversations and translate insights into concrete product features and technical strategy.
- Design, build, and ship full-stack applications using Node.js, TypeScript, React, and Python.
- Push the AI capabilities of the product forward, including LLM design patterns, vector stores, and model fine-tuning.
- Transition the product from prototype and demo mode into a scalable, high-quality production system.
- Contribute to shaping the product roadmap, architecture decisions, and overall company direction.
What We're Looking For
- 2 or more 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.
- Experience designing and deploying scalable products from MVP through to production.
- Comfort leading customer conversations and turning feedback into clear product requirements.
- Strong system-design ability, including reasoning about scope, constraints, and trade-offs in a startup context.
- Experience in startup or early-stage environments, with a bias toward pragmatic, startup-appropriate architecture decisions.
- Broad product-engineering range rather than a background concentrated in a single discipline such as ML, data, or frontend.
- Bonus: experience with vector databases, semantic search, or transitioning products from prototype to production.
Location
Hybrid from Berlin, Germany. Visa sponsorship is available.
Additional Details
- City
- Berlin
- State
- BE
- Country
- US
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