Senior Data Engineer (Search) (m/f/x)

About us

We’re Cortea , a Berlin startup transforming audits with AI . Manual, document-heavy audits waste expert time while demand keeps rising. Our AI-powered software and specialized AI agents remove the repetitive work so auditors can focus on judgment.

Backed by top-tier VCs with >15m funding, with a working product and paying customers, we’re rapidly scaling.

We value first-principles thinking, speed, trust, and kindness . We build side by side in our Berlin office .

Your Role

You'll own the data and quality infrastructure that makes Cortea's AI pipeline trustworthy and continuously improving. Pipeline data, evals, observability, ground truth, retrieval quality.

You're a builder. You write production Python. You think in pipelines and feedback loops, not notebooks. You've worked with LLM outputs in production and have strong opinions about how to make probabilistic systems measurable.

What you’ll do

• Build and operate the data pipelines behind Cortea's AI. Every model call, every pipeline state, every customer document, captured, queryable, observable

• Create the foundation for evaluating agent performance and quality. Make probabilistic quality measurable, regression-detectable, and reproducible across model versions

• Maintain observability of agent cost and optimizations

• Improve document extraction and retrieval quality on the documents that matter most (financial statements, audit reports, complex tables)

• Maintain the Data FBigQuery foundation engineers, PMs, and founders use to make decisions

• Partner with engineering and product to turn customer feedback into measurable, shipped improvements

Success at 6 months

• Eval framework live across our core pipelines — every ship is measured before it goes out

• Cost and quality observability on every pipeline run, alerting that catches regressions early

• Document extraction and retrieval quality measurably better on the documents customers care about most

• Trusted by engineers and founders to own the data foundation end-to-end

Qualifications

• 4+ years total, 3+ shipping production data infrastructure (pipelines, warehouses, observability)

• Strong Python and SQL. Reads code to understand data, doesn't just trust schemas

• Has worked with LLM outputs in production. Has built or seriously used an eval framework

• Comfortable with cloud data warehouses (BigQuery preferred, Snowflake/Redshift fine), distributed processing, batch and streaming

• Cares about outcomes over process, clarity over frameworks

• Comfortable with startup environment high autonomy, high ambiguity, high speed

Bonus

• Built or seriously contributed to retrieval/RAG, document extraction, or OCR systems

• GCP / BigQuery / Temporal experience

• Background in audit, compliance, legal, or another document-heavy professional services domain

• Speaks German

No one checks every box. If you’ve shipped retrieval systems and like owning evaluations and pipelines, let’s talk.

What we offer

• Attractive compensation: competitive salary plus significant equity

• High impact & growth: Shape AI at a scaling startup

• 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 Liza

• Second Call — Technical interview with with a member of our technical staff

• Third Call — Deep dive into our culture with our Co-Founder Philipp

• On-site 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.