Senior Software Engineer; Search; m​/f​/x

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

Join to apply for the Senior Software Engineer (Search) (m/f/x) role at Cortea AI

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.

Own search ’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.

• 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

• 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

• Ranking systems: learning‑to‑rank, re‑ranking, relevance tuning
• Distributed compute / orchestration:
  Spark, Ray, or Temporal
• Search engines:
  Elasticsearch / Open Search at scale
• Warehouses:
  Big Query, Snowflake, or similar
• Post‑training LMs for retrieval/ranking
• Data engineering experience

• 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
• Competitive compensation: €80‑€120k salary plus significant equity
• Personal development:
  Learning budget for courses and conferences
• Startup perks:
  Flexible vacation, team lunches, retreats, central Berlin office

• First Call — Intro to Cortea with our Founders Associate Leon
• Second Call — Technical interview with Rino
• Third Call — Deep dive into our culture with 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.

Compensation Range: €80K - €110K