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.