Founding Engineer; Cortena

👋 About Cortena

Cortena is building the next generation of AI-native financial intelligence for SMEs. Finance teams today are overwhelmed by fragmented workflows, manual operations, and disconnected tools that never deliver a complete picture.

We’re changing that.

Based in Rotterdam and backed by Builders Studio, Cortena is on a mission to give finance leaders clarity, foresight, and control - not by adding more tools, but by connecting finance workflows into a single coherent system. We combine modern AI, automation, and agentic financial reasoning to help companies make faster, smarter, and more confident decisions.

Cortena’s belief is simple: real financial intelligence only emerges when finance workflows stop living in silos. Cortena brings these workflows together into a single, connected platform where autonomous finance agents can run operations on clean, structured, and contextualised data. As these workflows converge, financial intelligence becomes something different - not a tool, but a natural output of an integrated, autonomous finance system.

As we enter a pivotal product-market fit phase with growing traction, we seek our Founding Engineer - a systems thinker and AI-driven builder - to pioneer the workflow connectivity, agentic automation, and intelligence layer that will define how modern companies run their finance function.

As our Founding Engineer, you’ll be a cornerstone of Cortena’s product and technical DNA, working closely with our CTO.

Your mission: architect and implement our AI-driven financial core, ensuring this intelligence flows into a seamless, intuitive product that finance leaders love. This is about building new financial reasoning systems with LLMs, agents and sophisticated forecasting algorithms — shaping a system that learns, adapts, and guides decision‑making.

This role is for a versatile, hands‑on builder who thrives at the intersection of AI, financial data, and product design, and is motivated to solve one of the most challenging and impactful problems in business: giving SMEs real‑time clarity over their financials.

• Research, design, and implement novel AI approaches for financial intelligence.

• Build and refine AI‑native financial models.

• Architect and deliver high‑quality, full‑stack components (from financial data pipelines to pixel‑perfect UI) that bring financial intelligence to life.

• Design scalable and secure data integrations and transformations with accounting systems (Xero, Exact, Quick Book, etc.) and adjacent tools (CRM, HRIS).

• Develop robust data pipelines & MLOps for ingesting, cleaning, and reasoning over financial data.

• Own the end‑to‑end lifecycle of AI features: from PoC to production, benchmarking, and continuous optimization.

• Ensure a delightful user journey: turning complexity (multi‑source financial data) into clear, actionable insights.

• Provide critical engineering input into product strategy and UX — ensuring the tech solves real finance team challenges.

• Co‑define Cortena’s AI & data roadmap with the CTO, aligning tech possibilities with business strategy.

• Core passion & mindset: Deep AI passion with a commitment to building exceptional, user‑centric products; a product‑minded engineer who champions great UX.

• Full‑stack AI expertise: 5+ years of versatile software engineering (front‑end, back‑end, infrastructure) with a track record of deploying and optimizing production‑grade ML/AI systems.

• Technical proficiency: Strong skills in our core stack (React, Type Script, Next.js) — or the ability to rapidly master new technologies.

• Advanced AI skills: Hands‑on experience with LLMs, reliable Feature Extraction, RAG, and vector databases (fine‑tuning, embeddings, prompt engineering), plus a solid grasp of core ML principles.

• Cloud & scalability: Proven ability to design and scale open‑source based cloud‑native apps and AI pipelines (Kubernetes, Nats, Mongo, Gitlab) with solid CI/CD practices. Ansible + Rancher experience for our self‑hosted Kubernetes cluster is a plus.

• Financial data modeling: Experience working with structured financial datasets, applying ML/AI for forecasting and…