Staff Software Engineer (f/m/d)

Berlin, Germany · Full-time · Permanent

About Our Client

Our client is a scale-up with serious backing – the energy and pace of a young company, combined with the stability and reach of some of the largest corporates in their sector. They build products and services with genuine social impact, in a category that matters, and they’re at a stage where a Staff-level engineer can shape the platform rather than inherit it.

The engineering culture takes AI-assisted development seriously – not as a novelty, but as a core part of how high-performing engineers work day to day.

Make an Impact By

You’ll spearhead the design and implementation of significant platform changes. You’ll set the technical bar for the team, raise the bar on how AI-assisted engineering is done here, and act as a multiplier for everyone around you. Expectations split into Primary and Supporting areas.

Primary

• Technical direction. You author or sponsor design documents that achieve stakeholder alignment without escalation. You run design reviews that surface real trade-offs, not rubber stamps. Your input on the technical roadmap is visible, justified, and acted on.
• Raising the bar. You raise team engineering standards through direct contribution and peer influence. You earn technical authority through the quality of your reasoning and your output.
• AI-assisted engineering. You use AI tools as a serious engineering accelerator – and you build that same capability in the people around you.
• Distributed systems judgement. You apply distributed systems patterns (event-driven, CQRS, API gateway, event sourcing) with demonstrated judgement about when they fit – and when they don’t.

Supporting

• Communication. You produce written artifacts – design docs, proposals, postmortems – that are clear, structured, and reach alignment without repeated clarification rounds.
• Pattern judgement. You know when not to use a pattern. Staff level requires the confidence to advocate for simplicity against organisational momentum toward complexity.
• Data judgement. You apply sound judgement to data modelling, query performance, and schema migrations under load, and you identify performance and migration risks before they reach production.
• Code and review quality. Your contributions are production-ready: correct, observable, operable, maintainable. Your reviews are substantive – you surface real risks and design issues, not style preferences.

Your Profile

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with clear evidence of operating at Staff level (cross-team technical impact, ownership of significant platform-level work, mentorship of senior engineers)
• Strong polyglot foundation. Primary stack is JVM (Java and Kotlin); experience with Go or Node.js is welcome
• Hands-on experience with modern frontend frameworks (React, Angular) and full-stack practices, enabling closer collaboration across teams and stronger execution on product-integration work
• Deep, production-grade experience with event-driven systems. Concrete experience with Kafka is required; Flink (or comparable stream processing) is a strong plus
• Solid command of distributed systems fundamentals: idempotency, exactly-once vs at-least-once trade-offs, backpressure, schema evolution, partitioning
• Experience designing and operating CQRS and event-sourcing patterns – and the judgement to know when not to use them
• Hands-on experience with API gateway technologies and patterns (routing, rate limiting, auth, traffic shaping)
• Strong database judgement across relational (PostgreSQL) and non-relational stores, including data modelling, query performance, and migrations under load
• A proven track record steering complex, multi-team technical projects end-to-end
• Effective, daily use of AI coding tools. The team uses Claude Code; experience with comparable tools (OpenAI Codex, opencode, Cursor and others) is fully transferable – but we want real fluency, not surface-level use
• Familiarity with cloud providers, ideally Azure
• Comfortable with container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Fluency in English; German is a plus