Lead Engineer (gn) @ AI Venture, Berlin

About the Venture

We are building AI infrastructure. Our pre-seed funding is secured, there is early customer demand and the product is already in production.

We are now looking for a Lead Engineer to build the core of the product with us, set the technical direction and grow the engineering team.

About the Role

As Lead Engineer, you will spend most of your time building. At least 80% of your week is hands-on coding on our core systems. The rest goes into setting the technical direction, leading a team of 2 engineers and helping us hire as the team grows.

We are an AI-native engineering team, with agentic engineering at the centre of how we write, review and ship code. Coding agents such as Claude Code are the default way we build software, not an add-on.

We are at a very early stage. Many of the important technical decisions are still ahead, and you will be one of the people making them.

What You’ll Do

• Write code every day and contribute directly to our core systems, from APIs to cloud infrastructure
• Set the technical direction with the founding team, from architecture to build-vs-buy decisions
• Lead and support our team of 2 engineers, review their work and set high engineering standards
• Support technical hiring and help shape how the engineering team grows
• Build and improve our agentic engineering setup, from harnesses and workflows to running multiple agents in parallel, evaluating their output and benchmarking what works
• Build and operate reliable AI infrastructure, with security, GDPR and European data residency built in

About You

You are a strong engineer who loves to build and is interested in more than the code itself. You care about how a team works, how technical decisions get made and how an engineering organisation takes shape at an early stage. You may already have led a team, or you may be a senior engineer ready to step into a lead role and take on the responsibility that comes with it.

• Strong backend and platform foundations, including distributed systems, API design, cloud infrastructure and production systems
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered systems or AI infrastructure in production
• Extensive daily use of coding agents such as Claude Code, with strong coding fundamentals and the judgement to review and own the quality of their output
• Experience designing and improving agentic engineering workflows, including harnesses, multi-agent orchestration and benchmarking, with a clear understanding of where agents help and where they fall short
• Experience as a Lead Engineer or Tech Lead, ideally in an early-stage startup, or as a senior engineer who has mentored others and is ready to step into a lead role
• A real interest in more than coding, including setting the technical direction, leading a team and hiring
• Fluent English; German is a plus

Why Join

Funding is secured and the product is already in production, but most of the important technical decisions are still ahead. You will write a lot of code, shape the architecture and help build the team from the start, with equity in the business you help build.

This is a full-time role, based in our Berlin office 5 days a week, starting as soon as possible.