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

We’re Cortea, a Berlin-based startup rebuilding how audits are done. Audits are still driven by spreadsheets, checklists, and manual reviews in one of the most regulated, high-stakes areas of business.

We build AI tools for auditors, so highly educated auditors no longer spend 60+ hour weeks on manual work and can focus on judgment, trust, and choices that matter. With €10m+ in funding, a live product, and paying customers across Europe, we’re at a stage where your choices will directly shape Cortea’s future, and how audits are done.

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.

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  Build and operate the data pipelines behind Cortea's AI. Every model call, every pipeline state, every customer document, captured, queryable, observable

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  Create the foundation for evaluating agent performance and quality. Make probabilistic quality measurable, regression-detectable, and reproducible across model versions

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  Maintain observability of agent cost and optimizations

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  Improve document extraction and retrieval quality on the documents that matter most (financial statements, audit reports, complex tables)

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  Maintain the BigQuery foundation engineers, PMs, and founders use to make decisions

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  Partner with engineering and product to turn customer feedback into measurable, shipped improvements

• 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

• 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

• First Call — Intro to Cortea with our Founders Associate Leon

• Second Call — Technical interview with with a member of our technical staff

• 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.