Senior Software Engineer (Search) (m/f/x)
Department: Engineering
Location: Berlin
Employment Type: FullTime
About us
We’re Cortea, a Berlin startup transforming audits with AI. Manual, document-heavy audits waste expert time; we automate the repetitive parts so experts focus on judgment. Backed by top-tier VCs with €10m+ funding, live product, paying customers. We value first-principles thinking, speed, trust, and kindness. We build side by side in our Berlin office.
Your Role
Own search at Cortea. You’ll design and ship retrieval, ranking, and evaluation systems that power our AI agents. You’ll also build the data pipelines behind them. You’ll work closely with product, design, and founders to turn messy, real-world documents into precise answers.
What you’ll do
Build and tune retrieval and ranking: lexical + neural
Own evaluation: datasets, metrics, dashboards, and regressions
Design data pipelines for ingestion, enrichment, and classification
Ship production code: Python services, APIs, SQL models, tests
Improve relevance through experimentation and systematic analysis
Qualifications
5+ years as a software engineer or applied scientist with hands-on information retrieval work
IR fundamentals: BM25, TF-IDF, and neural retrieval
Evaluation: comfortable with NDCG, MRR, Precision@K and when to use each
Data & software: Python (asyncio, type hints, pandas) and strong SQL (modeling, window functions, CTEs, optimization)
Production APIs: design, implementation, and maintenance
Bonus
Ranking systems: learning-to-rank, re-ranking, relevance tuning
Distributed compute / orchestration: Spark, Ray, or Temporal
Search engines: Elasticsearch / OpenSearch at scale
Warehouses: BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar
Post-training LMs for retrieval/ranking
Data engineering experience
No one checks every box. If you’ve shipped retrieval systems and like owning evaluations and pipelines, let’s talk.
What we offer
High impact & growth: Shape strategy at a scaling AI startup from day one
Mission-driven culture: Ambitious team valuing first-principles thinking and bold ideas
Attractive compensation: competitive salary plus significant equity
Personal development: Learning budget for courses and conferences
Startup perks: Flexible vacation, team lunches, retreats, central Berlin office
Interview process
First Call — Intro to Cortea with our Founders Associate Leon
Second Call — Technical interview with Jendrik
Third Call — Deep dive into our culture with our Co-Founder Philipp
On-site Half-Day (Berlin) — Meet the team and work on a real problem together
We’re an equal-opportunity team and encourage women and underrepresented groups to apply.
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