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Wir sind Cortea, ein Berliner Startup, das Audits mit KI neu denkt. Klassische Prüfungen sind oft manuell, dokumentenlastig und binden wertvolle Expertenzeit während der Bedarf an Audits weiter steigt. Mit unserer KI-gestützten Software und spezialisierten AI Agents automatisieren wir repetitive Arbeit, damit Auditor:innen sich auf das konzentrieren können, was wirklich zählt: fundierte Entscheidungen.
Wir sind mit über 15 Mio. Euro von führenden VCs finanziert, haben ein funktionierendes Produkt im Markt und bereits zahlende Kunden. Jetzt skalieren wir schnell.
Uns treiben First-Principles-Denken, Geschwindigkeit, Vertrauen und Freundlichkeit an. Wir bauen Cortea gemeinsam, direkt vor Ort in unserem Berliner Office.
Diese Rolle ist für erfahrene Audit-Professionals, die keine Checklisten mehr abarbeiten wollen sondern Systeme entwickeln möchten, die sie überflüssig machen.
Du bringst tiefes Praxiswissen darüber mit, wie Prüfungen wirklich funktionieren, und übersetzt dieses Wissen in strukturierte Logik, die unsere Software skalierbar ausführen kann. Du musst kein:e Entwickler:in sein. Aber du denkst klar in Prozessen, kannst komplexe Standards in konkrete Regeln zerlegen und hast ein starkes Verständnis dafür, wie ein belastbares, qualitativ hochwertiges Prüfungsergebnis aussehen muss.
Audit-Logik entwickeln. Du übersetzt komplexe Anforderungen aus ISA- und IDW-Standards in klare Workflows, denen unsere Software folgen kann. Du definierst die Regeln, das System wendet sie an.
Komplexe Dokumente analysierbar machen. Du gestaltest mit, wie unsere Software Verträge und Abschlüsse liest und interpretiert, etwa bei Leasing nach IFRS 16 oder Revenue Recognition. Du definierst, worauf das System achten und wann es Ausnahmen markieren soll.
Unabhängigkeit absichern. Du entwickelst Checks, die eine übermäßige Abhängigkeit von automatisierten Ergebnissen verhindern. So stellst du sicher, dass unsere Workflows mit IDW PS 210 vereinbar bleiben und Reviewer jederzeit die Kontrolle über das professionelle Urteil behalten.
Dokumentationsqualität verantworten. Du sorgst dafür, dass jedes Systemergebnis sauber in die Prüfungsakte integriert werden kann, im Einklang mit IDW PS 450 und belastbar für Qualitätskontrolle und Peer Review.
Cortea extern vertreten. Du nimmst an Branchenveranstaltungen teil, wirkst an Fachpublikationen mit und bringst dich in Gespräche mit Regulatoren zur Rolle von Technologie in der Prüfung ein..
Du bringst mindestens 6 Jahre Erfahrung in der Abschlussprüfung mit, idealerweise aus Big 4 oder einer führenden mittelständischen Prüfungsgesellschaft. Du hast auf Prüfungsleiter-Level gearbeitet und weißt, was Mandatsverantwortung und Haftungsrisiken in der Praxis bedeuten.
Du kennst IDW PS, ISA und HGB sicher und kannst Standards in klare, reproduzierbare Prozesse übersetzen.
Du denkst in strukturierten Schritten. Du musst nicht programmieren können, aber du kannst Entscheidungsbäume skizzieren, benötigte Inputs definieren und beschreiben, wie ein korrektes Ergebnis aussehen muss.
Du willst den Berufsstand mitprägen — nicht nur den nächsten Karriereschritt machen, sondern etwas bauen, das verändert, wie Prüfungen durchgeführt werden.
Du sprichst Deutsch und Englisch auf muttersprachlichem oder nahezu muttersprachlichem Niveau.
Nahtlose Umsetzung: Wir arbeiten fokussiert, schnell und mit hohem Anspruch an regulatorische Exzellenz. Sorgfalt ist für uns kein Hindernis, sondern die Grundlage für verlässlichen Fortschritt.
Qualität by Design: Wir glauben, dass systemgestützte Konsistenz Reviews entlastet und die Verlässlichkeit des Prüfungsurteils stärkt.
Intellektuelle Ehrlichkeit: Wir diskutieren tief, logisch und offen. Wenn ein Feature professionelle Skepsis gefährden könnte, denken wir es neu.
Impact: Die Chance, die Tools zu bauen, die du dir in der Prüfung immer gewünscht hättest.
Wachstum: Der Wechsel aus der klassischen Prüfung in eine wachstumsstarke Rolle an der Schnittstelle von Audit und KI.
Vergütung: Wettbewerbsfähiges Gehalt und relevante Equity-Beteiligung.
Intro call mit Liza (Founders Associate)
Fachliches (Audit-) Interview mit Philipp, Co-Founder.
Strategic & Collaboration Fit mit Valentin, Co-Founder.
On-site Session in Berlin: Eine gemeinsame Session in unserem Berliner Office, in der wir eine „Reviewer-First“-Oberfläche entwickeln mit Fokus auf maximale Transparenz, Nachvollziehbarkeit und professionelle Skepsis.
At Cortea, we envision a world where every audit is proactively managed by humans and AI agents collaboratively. Where auditing professionals have superhuman capabilities at their fingertips to strengthen the trust in the world's most critical systems.
We're not just improving auditing workflows, we're redefining how audits are done from the ground up. With a rapidly growing, global customer base and backing from world-class investors, the market is ready. What we ship next decides how big this gets.
This is your chance to join a team of sharp, ambitious and kind builders extremely early. Shape the company at its pivotal moment and build something that truly matters.
At Cortea, design earns trust, and we sell to an industry that exists to produce it. Auditors are paid to be skeptical, and people judge quality by what they can see: the product, the website, the deck a partner opens in a boardroom, the newsletter someone reads with their first coffee. All of it is Cortea.
This is a role for someone with great taste in designing software and AI systems. You'll find novel patterns for problems that haven't existed in software before, and you'll own how Cortea looks and feels to the outside world.
Roughly 70% product, 30% brand. The product work is deep, expert-facing and systems-heavy. As we are doubling down on design, you'll be working on taking the core flows to the next level. The brand work is yours to own outright: website, marketing and sales visuals, newsletter, event and content assets. It'll be on screen in a Big4 boardroom, in every customer's inbox, and on the wall at the events we host. A lot of surface for one designer, and all of it yours.
We're not looking for someone to ask whether the logo goes left or right. We're looking for someone with opinions.
Work directly with our founders, engineers, and customers to turn audit flows into intuitive, delightful interfaces
Work with Jonas on product design and design strategy overall
Own our brand designs and visuals
Evolve our visual identity and design system
Take increasing ownership of brand direction. Website, marketing and sales material, content and event assets
Help shape the product vision, roadmap, and user experience standards
Run usability tests, build user feedback loops, and bring a systems mindset to design decisions
Have product design experience in B2B / SaaS, ideally in fast-moving startups.
Think in experiences, not screens. With taste you can defend. Product and brand are one surface; you can explain why details work, and you call out when they don’t.
Want to create a unique brand, which auditors love. Identify, marketing, web should be a draw, not a tax. Taste and passion matter more than volume.
Can hold complexity without losing clarity. You turn configuration-heavy, expert workflows into clear systems.
Use AI without sacrificing quality. You've worked out which parts of the job benefit from automation and which need your judgment.
Work well in ambiguity. You take rough direction and deliver great work without handholding.
Have low ego. Best idea wins. You give and take feedback without making it about you.
Titles are fuzzy. If you're operating at principal level, or you're currently freelancing and curious rather than actively looking, talk to us anyway.
Full brand ownership, shape how the product feels. Work face-to-face with experienced founders and learn directly from customer insights.
Real influence on strategy. In a small team of excellent engineers and operators with high autonomy, you will shape product direction. Best idea wins, regardless of seniority.
Fast, ambitious, and fun team. Decisions get made in hours, not weeks. Rapid experimentation is the default.
Meaningful equity and competitive salary. You are one of the first to build this, and you share in the upside.
A mission that matters. Building intelligent systems for a $200bn industry from Berlin, with AI at the core
First Call — Intro on what we do with Liza
Second Call — Portfolio walkthrough with Jonas
Third Call — Get to know our product and culture with our Co-Founder Valentin
On-site Day — Meet our full team in our Berlin office and work on a real problem together with us.
Cortea is building the quality layer for AI-powered audits.
Our Audit Quality Agents help audit firms use AI with greater trust, consistency, and professional oversight. Built around auditing standards and review workflows, they enable firms to deliver more reliable and reviewable work while increasing capacity across the audit process.
We're building an AI-native company from day one. We believe small teams, equipped with AI and empowered to move fast, can solve some of the biggest challenges facing the audit profession.
We're looking for our first Product Marketing & Content Lead to help define how the market understands Cortea, why firms adopt our products, and how we become the category-defining voice in AI-powered audit.
This isn't a traditional marketing role.
As our first Product Marketing & Content Lead, you'll shape how the market understands Cortea and how our customers experience our products—from first impression to every product release.
You'll report directly to the VP Marketing and work closely with the founders, product, design, sales, and customer success teams. You'll have a seat at the table with the leadership team, helping shape our product narrative, go-to-market strategy, and category positioning.
This is a hands-on role for someone who enjoys turning complex technology into simple, compelling stories. You'll own product positioning, messaging, launches, customer communications, thought leadership, and our content engine.
You'll have significant ownership from day one and the opportunity to build this function as Cortea grows.
Develop and continuously refine Cortea's positioning, messaging, and category narrative.
Translate product capabilities into clear customer value propositions.
Lead product launches and feature releases across every customer touchpoint.
Own customer communications around product releases, including release notes, feature announcements, newsletters, and adoption campaigns.
Build competitive intelligence and market insights.
Develop customer personas and messaging frameworks.
Create sales enablement materials that help our commercial team win.
Partner closely with Product to ensure launches are coordinated and impactful.
Own Cortea's content strategy across all channels.
Produce exceptional thought leadership on AI, auditing, regulation, quality, and the future of professional services.
Interview customers and industry experts to uncover unique stories and insights.
Write and edit everything from blog articles to research reports and customer stories.
Develop AI-powered content systems that scale without compromising quality.
Build and maintain an editorial calendar that compounds over time.
Help establish Cortea as the leading voice in AI-powered auditing.
Partner closely with the VP Marketing on category strategy and messaging.
Support executive thought leadership across the leadership team.
Identify emerging market trends and turn them into compelling narratives.
Build signature content that becomes a reference point for the industry.
Partner with Sales and Customer Success to improve customer education and product adoption.
Support demand generation with high-quality product marketing assets.
Scale organic growth through content and SEO.
Measure the performance of launches, messaging, and content.
Continuously gather customer insights and bring them back into Product and Marketing.
5+ years of experience in Product Marketing, Content Marketing, or a similar B2B SaaS role.
Exceptional writing and storytelling skills.
Experience launching products and translating technical capabilities into compelling customer narratives.
Strong understanding of product positioning and messaging.
Experience creating content that drives measurable business outcomes.
Excellent interviewing, research, and communication skills.
A highly proactive mindset with the ability to thrive in ambiguity.
Comfortable working directly with executives and cross-functional leadership teams.
Experience in AI, enterprise software, or B2B SaaS.
Experience marketing products for professional services, finance, accounting, audit, or compliance.
Strong SEO knowledge.
Experience building founder or executive thought leadership.
Familiarity with modern AI tools and AI-native marketing workflows.
Experience building content operations and editorial processes.
Think like an owner.
Love understanding customers.
Care deeply about clear communication.
Enjoy simplifying complex ideas.
Prefer building over managing.
Are naturally curious and ask great questions.
Like working across Product, Sales, and Marketing.
Want to help define a new category—not just market another software product.
Within your first year:
Cortea has a clear and differentiated product narrative.
Every product launch has a repeatable go-to-market process.
Customers consistently understand the value of new capabilities.
Cortea is recognized as one of the leading voices in AI-powered audit.
Our content engine generates meaningful awareness, engagement, and pipeline.
Product Marketing becomes a core strategic function within the company.
Build one of Europe's most ambitious AI companies from an early stage.
Report directly to the VP Marketing and work closely with the founders and leadership team.
Own an entire function from day one.
Help define the future of AI in one of the world's largest professional services industries.
Competitive compensation and meaningful equity.
Work with a small, ambitious team that believes in moving fast, thinking independently, and using AI to do the best work of their careers.
We know great candidates don't always check every box.
If you're excited about the role, passionate about storytelling, product marketing, and AI, and believe you can help shape the future of audit, we'd love to hear from you.
Show us something you've created that changed how people think.
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 use AI to automate audits end to end, so highly educated auditors no longer spend 60+ hour weeks on manual work and can focus on judgment, trust, and choices that matter.
With €15m+ 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.
This isn't an administrative or \"assistant\" role. As Chief of Staff, you are a core member of the leadership orbit. You will work directly with Valentin (Co-Founder) to translate high-level vision into operational reality.
You will sit at the intersection of Growth, Strategy, Finance, and Operations. Your mission is to tackle the most complex, ambiguous challenges that don’t yet have a home, whether that’s architecting our international expansion, refining our AI-driven unit economics, or managing the machinery of a Series B fundraise.
This role is a springboard. You will gain a \"CEO-level\" view of building a category-defining AI company.
Strategic Initiatives: Lead high-impact projects from conception to completion (e.g., designing an AI-era pricing model, spearheading entry into new European markets, or optimizing the sales-to-onboarding funnel).
Fundraising & IR: Act as the primary engine behind investor relations and future funding rounds, preparing the narratives and data rooms that will fuel Cortea’s growth.
Scaling the AI-Native Operating System: Build the repeatable processes, meeting cadences, and communication loops — supercharged with AI agents and automation — that allow Cortea to scale toward €100m+ ARR without losing speed. You'll treat internal workflows as products, deploying AI wherever it removes friction.
Founder Force Multiplier: Act as a proxy for the founders in internal and external meetings, ensuring decisions are made and projects stay on track even when the founders aren't in the room.
4+ years of experience in high-velocity environments (Top-tier Strategy Consulting, Investment Banking, or a high-growth VC-backed startup).
Strategic Operator: You can think at 30,000 feet about market positioning, but you have the grit to dive into a spreadsheet or a legal contract to get a deal over the line.
Financial Fluency: You have a deep understanding of P&L management, financial modeling, and SaaS metrics.
Exceptional Communicator: You can distill complex AI concepts and financial data into clear, persuasive narratives for investors and the team.
High Agency: You don’t wait for a playbook; you write it. You are comfortable with the ambiguity of a \"zero-to-one\" environment.
Language: Native or professional fluency in both English and German (C1+) is essential for this Berlin-based role.
Founder mindset: Everyone acts like a founder. You’re encouraged to take on any topic you believe is worth improving, with team and founder support.
Thoughtful decision-making: Collaborative problem solving, concise written thinking, and deep in-person discussions to reach the best result.
Speed over perfection: We value progress and learning, preferring strong 80/20 solutions over perfection.
Feedback & learning: We give and ask for feedback weekly. Not monthly.
In 3 months: You have worked through our ops, deployed workflow automations across the company, and offloaded 20% of the founders' highest-priority tasks.
In 6 months: You have led at least one major cross-functional launch (e.g., a new country or a major pricing pivot) and are the go-to person for our lead investors.
In 12 months: You have helped institutionalize the \"Cortea Way,\" creating a scalable operational foundation that supports our next major funding milestone.
Impact: A seat at the table during the most critical growth phase of a well-funded AI startup.
Growth: Mentorship from experienced founders and close collaboration across the company
Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful equity.
Perks: Learning budget, team lunches, off-sites, flexible vacation, and a supportive in-office setup in central Berlin
Intro call with Liza (Founders Associate)
Strategy & finance interview, real-world scenario with Valentin (Co-Founder)
Culture interview, Values and Collaboration Fit with Philipp (Co-Founder)
On-site day (Berlin): meet the team and work through a real, current problem
We’re an equal‑opportunity team and strongly encourage women and underrepresented candidates to apply.
Cortea is building the quality layer for AI-powered audits.
Our Audit Quality Agents help audit firms use AI with greater trust, consistency, and professional oversight. Built around auditing standards and review workflows, they enable firms to deliver more reliable and reviewable work while increasing capacity across the audit process.
We're building an AI-native company from day one. We believe small teams, equipped with AI and empowered to move fast, can solve some of the biggest challenges facing the audit profession.
As an AI Product Manager, you'll work on products in our AI audit toolbox alongside engineers, designers, auditors and our founders. You'll spend your time understanding what auditors need, helping shape what we build next, and making sure we ship things that actually solve real problems.
Contribute to the discovery, definition, and delivery of products in our AI toolbox
Talk to customers weekly to uncover pain points and validate solutions
Prototype with AI tools (Cursor, Claude, v0, etc.) to test ideas in hours, instead of weeks
Work tightly with engineering and design throughout the build cycle
Help us understand the messy reality of AI capabilities (and limits) and turn that into product decisions: what's worth building, what's not yet ready, where humans stay in the loop
Bring structure to the problem space: clear writing, sharp questions, useful PRDs
You've contributed to and shipped 3+ meaningful product bets within your first 6 months, learning through iteration and customer feedback along the way.
You've gone deep on at least one core product area (e.g. a specific tool in our AI toolbox, a customer segment, our evals & quality framework, or the UX of agentic workflows) and become exceptionally strong in it
You're trusted by founders, engineers, and customers to steward important product decisions
Have 4–7 years of experience, with at least 2 years in a product role
Have shipped B2B SaaS products that real customers pay for and use
Are AI-native in how you work: you use LLMs, agents, and AI tooling daily and have strong intuition for what they can and can't do today
Have shipped at least one AI-powered feature or product and understand the unique product challenges (evals, latency, hallucinations, trust, UX of probabilistic systems)
Go deep into context to truly understand user problems
Are comfortable in early-stage startup chaos. High autonomy, high ambiguity, high speed
You've founded a company or shipped a serious AI side project
You can read code, run small scripts, or fine-tune prompts yourself
Experience in audit, compliance, legal, or another document-heavy professional services domain
High impact & growth: Front-row seat to a fast-scaling AI startup, with the chance to grow alongside the product
Mission-driven culture: First-principles thinking, bold ideas, and a supportive team
Attractive compensation: competitive salary + meaningful equity
Personal development: Learning budget for courses and conferences
Dynamic environment: Central Berlin office, team lunches, retreats, flexible vacation
First Call: Intro to Cortea with our Founders Associate Liza
Second Call: Product deep-dive with our Co-Founder & CPO Philipp
Third Call: Deep dive into our culture with our Co-Founder & CEO Valentin
On-site Day (Berlin): Meet the team and work on a real problem together
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.
You build talent foundations. You’ll design a process, that bring in exceptional talent across Tech and Non-Tech, and build a culture we’re proud of.
Own the Talent end to end: job design → scope → JD → sourcing → structured interviews → offer → close
Build a Talent Engine: attract great people proactively; both inbound and outbound
Raise the hiring bar: scorecards, trained interviewers, consistent candidate experience
Shape our brand for Tech/AI talent with content, events, and a strong referral loop
Be culture-positive: partner with founders on rituals, onboarding handover, and feedback loops
Have 5+ years of TA in a fast environment (startup/scale-up or agency)
Have hired top talent before and know the difference in how to assess them
Communicate clearly, leverage our founding team, and make data driven decisions fast
Can show early-stage track record you’re proud of
Think in systems and improve with data; bonus if you’ve built employer branding for engineers/AI
We value kindness + candor + execution, speed with care, and strong ownership
We’re fully in-office in Berlin because we like building side by side
We hire with structured interviews and clear scorecards to reduce bias
Non-linear paths welcome. Career breaks welcome. If you’re unsure, apply.
High impact from day one and a path to Head of Talent/People as we grow
Competitive salary + meaningful equity (range shared on the first call)
In-office energy. shared lunches, whiteboard time, fast decisions, real teamwork
Uncapped growth. Budget for tools, learning, and events you choose
Intro Call (25 min) with Liza
Expert interview (45 min): with Valentin (Co-Founder) - deep dive into: sourcing strategy, process design, quality in decisions)
Cultural interview (45 min): with Philipp (Co-Founder) - collaboration, judgment, and culture add
On-site day (Berlin): meet the team and work on a real life assignment
We're Cortea, a European audit-tech company, born in Berlin, rebuilding how audits are done everywhere.
Audits are still driven by spreadsheets, checklists, and manual reviews in one of the most regulated, high-stakes areas of business. We use AI to automate audits end to end, so highly educated auditors no longer spend 60+ hour weeks on manual work and can focus on judgment, trust, and choices that matter.
With €15m+ 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.
This is a role for an experienced auditor who enjoys the client side of the profession: building relationships, leading discussions, and earning the trust of sceptical practitioners. As part of Cortea's UK go-to-market team, you are the subject-matter expert who gives our commercial work credibility: you speak with auditors as a peer, lead methodology conversations with prospects and customers, and help turn pilots into long-term partnerships. Colleagues own the sales playbook, forecasting, and deal mechanics, while you own trust, expertise, and account growth.
Audit Expertise: Act as the audit subject-matter expert in Cortea's UK go-to-market unit, joining demos, pilots, and customer conversations as the credible auditor in the room
Customer Relationships & Growth: Be a key point of contact for our UK customers throughout pilots and rollouts; deepen relationships at existing customers, identify upsell opportunities, and lead methodology conversations that grow accounts
Industry Voice: Build a visible public presence for Cortea: be active on LinkedIn, speak at industry events, and evangelise AI-supported auditing to the UK profession
Market Insight: Feed customer and market insight back to our product team to sharpen the UK roadmap
Berlin Collaboration: Travel regularly to our Berlin hub to work closely with the founders and go-to-market colleagues
Minimum 5 years of financial audit experience (Big 4 or leading mid-tier firms preferred)
ACA (ICAEW), ACCA, or equivalent chartered accountancy qualification
A confident, client-facing communicator: you enjoy presenting, networking, and representing your firm publicly, including at events and on LinkedIn
Comfortable taking ownership in a young, fast-moving company: you handle ambiguity well, work towards clear commercial targets, and enjoy building processes rather than following established ones
Strong grasp of ISA, UK GAAP, IFRS, and the Companies Act 2006, enough to hold your own in methodology discussions with partners
Native in English, German is a plus
Right to work in the UK required; we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role
Competitive salary plus equity participation
High-impact role at the intersection of audit and AI, with the chance to build Cortea's UK customer base and public presence
Hybrid collaboration from our London office, with regular trips to our Berlin hub
25+ days holiday allowance
Pension contribution
Private medical insurance
Intro call with Tim (Founders Associate)
Technical audit interview with Philipp (Co-Founder)
GTM & Collaboration Fit interview with Valentin (Co-Founder)
On-site session (Berlin): run a mock methodology conversation with a sceptical audit partner, focused on credibility, objection handling, and expansion thinking
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.
We're looking for an experienced engineer who's happy anywhere in the stack and turns complex audit workflows into product auditors rely on every day. You pick up whatever a problem needs, from the data model to the interface to the agents behind it.
A lot of what we build has no reference implementation. You're comfortable wading into something nobody has solved yet and shipping a first version that actually works.
Our engineering team is a small, flat group of builders: strong ICs who open a laptop when they see a problem instead of scheduling a meeting. Everyone owns real product and architecture decisions, and that's exactly what we want more of.
Build the interfaces auditors work in, partnering with design to turn complex flows into something that feels effortless
Build and improve the agents at the core of the product, plus the harnesses and eval pipelines around them
Make the long-running workflows behind the product reliable and debuggable, so failures surface fast instead of silently
Use AI heavily in your own workflow to move faster, without ever shipping output you can't stand behind
Drive the how in RFCs and technical discussions with other engineers, and partner with product on the what
You'll fit here if you:
Have 5+ years shipping production web applications across the stack
Write production APIs and model the data behind them so it holds up under multi-tenancy and load
Are strong on the frontend and can build genuinely complex UI
Get how LLM agents actually work: agents, harnesses, tool use, and measuring quality with evals
Keep up with where AI is moving and bring the latest tools into how you work to make yourself faster
Bring a strong product mindset and real ownership of outcomes
Make architectural decisions, weigh trade-offs, and build things other engineers can extend
Are comfortable with ambiguity and work things out from fundamentals when there's no established answer
Nice-to-haves that are a plus:
Hands-on experience building agents, harnesses, or eval pipelines
Data-dense or workflow-heavy B2B products
Scaling multi-tenant systems as data and traffic grow
Audit, finance, compliance, or another domain where being wrong is expensive
Early-stage startup or fast-moving engineering environment
No one checks every box. If you ship across frontend, backend, and data and own what you build, let's talk.
React, TS, Tailwind, TanStack
Python, Postgres, Temporal, Kafka, Redis
GCP, Azure, k8s
GitHub, Linear, Slack, Notion
High impact & growth: Front-row seat to scaling an AI startup with real ownership from day one
Mission-driven culture: First-principles thinking, bold ideas, and a supportive team
Attractive compensation: competitive salary + meaningful equity
Personal development: Learning budget for courses and conferences
True Berlin startup environment: Central Berlin office, team lunches, retreats, flexible vacation
First Call — Intro to Cortea with our Founders Associate Liza
Second Call — Technical interview with our Member of Technical Staff Jendrik
Third Call — Deep dive into our culture with our Co-Founder Philipp
On-site Half-Day (Berlin) — Meet the team and work on a real problem together
We're Cortea, a European audit-tech company, born in Berlin, rebuilding how audits are done everywhere.
Audits are still driven by spreadsheets, checklists, and manual reviews in one of the most regulated, high-stakes areas of business. We use AI to automate audits end to end, so highly educated auditors no longer spend 60+ hour weeks on manual work and can focus on judgment, trust, and choices that matter.
With €15m+ 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.
This is a role for an auditor with a deep interest in audit methodology: someone who knows the standards in detail, recognises where they leave room for interpretation, and wants to build the tools they always wished they had. Someone who is curious about the newest tools and tech trends entering the ecosystem, and has built a point of view on how the industry can best be served by tech, AI and innovation. Reporting to Philipp (Co-Founder), you sit closer to the product than a typical audit hire: you translate audit methodology into structured logic, write and refine the prompts that drive our AI workflows, and work day to day with our engineering team in Berlin to shape how audit logic is built, tested, and shipped. No programming background is required. What matters is rigorous process thinking and a deep understanding of how audits actually get done.
Product Shaping: Work as a standing part of the product process: join reviews and design sessions, give hands-on feedback on prototypes, and help prioritise the roadmap
Methodology to Logic: Translate complex ISA (UK) and international auditing standards into structured, executable logic our product and engineering team can build directly into the platform
Prompt Engineering: Write, test, and refine the prompts and decision logic that drive our AI audit workflows
Documentation Quality: Ensure audit documentation quality aligns with ISA (UK) 230 and related documentation requirements, and that system outputs stand up to internal quality control and external review
Independence & Ethics: Safeguard auditor independence and ensure the product complies with the FRC Ethical Standard and ICAEW/ACCA Code of Ethics
Berlin Collaboration: Travel regularly to our Berlin hub to work in person with Philipp and the product and engineering team
Minimum 5 years of financial audit experience (Big 4 or leading mid-tier firms preferred), including time at audit manager level with a solid understanding of engagement responsibility and audit risk
ACA (ICAEW), ACCA, or equivalent chartered accountancy qualification
A strong interest in audit methodology: you enjoy turning abstract standards into clear, reproducible logic
A tech-first mindset and a proven willingness to leverage, experiment with, or build new tools, with relentless curiosity for how AI and innovation can improve work and outcomes
Ability to sketch decision trees and define structured, unambiguous process outputs; comfortable writing and iterating on AI prompts
No programming background required, but you think in processes, dependencies, and system logic, and enjoy working closely with engineers day to day
Strong grasp of ISA (UK), UK GAAP (FRS 102), IFRS, and the Companies Act 2006
Native in English, German is a plus
Competitive salary plus equity participation
The chance to build the tools you always wished you'd had as an auditor, with direct influence over product direction
Hybrid collaboration from our London office, with regular trips to our Berlin hub
25+ days holiday allowance
Pension contribution
Private medical insurance
Intro call with Liza (Founders Associate)
Technical audit & methodology interview with Philipp (Co-Founder)
Strategic & Collaboration Fit interview with Valentin (Co-Founder)
On-site session (Berlin/London): work through a \"reviewer-first\" interface design exercise, focused on transparency, traceability, and professional scepticism
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 EUR 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.
We are looking for an engineer with strong backend, data, and AI systems experience to build the evaluation and observability foundation for production-grade LLM agents used in complex audit workflows.
This role sits at the intersection of backend engineering, data infrastructure, and AI quality. You will build the evaluation systems that power our multimodal retrieval agents and continuously improve critical quality metrics across current and future pipelines.
You’ll work at the edge of applied AI and information retrieval, building multimodal agentic pipelines and solving hard context and agent-harness engineering problems.
This is not a traditional analytics, BI, or dashboarding role. You should expect to write production code, design data architecture, work inside backend systems, and directly improve the quality, cost, reliability, and performance of LLM-based agents.
You will help build and operate the technical systems around our AI agents, with a focus on data infrastructure, evaluation, observability, and optimization. You will:
Build online and offline evaluation systems for LLM agents, including pipelines that use golden datasets, ground-truth data, human review workflows, and experiment results.
Create automated quality gates so changes to prompts, context, models, or agent logic can be tested before reaching production.
Analyze large volumes of agent traces and executions in columnar and analytical databases such as BigQuery or ClickHouse to identify failure modes, quality regressions, latency issues, reliability gaps, and cost optimization opportunities.
Build reliable data retention and replay mechanisms for long-term analysis of production agent behavior.
Manage observability tools for tracing, monitoring, debugging, and experiment management of our audit agents.
Team up with backend engineers to improve the speed and reliability of our retrieval and reasoning agents.
Have strong Python and/or backend engineering experience.
Have a solid understanding of how LLM and agent systems are evaluated—including deterministic checks, ground truth, LLM-as-judge, human review, and quality metrics—and can reason about when each approach is appropriate.
Have deployed and operated systems in the cloud, ideally on GCP.
Have hands-on experience building end-to-end retrieval or ML pipeline evaluation systems and using LLM observability or experimentation tools such as Braintrust, MLflow, Langfuse, or Weights & Biases.
Are comfortable working with analytical databases, data warehouses, columnar stores, and high-volume event or trace data.
Understand system design, reliability, observability, monitoring, logging, debugging, and operational trade-offs.
Bring senior-level engineering judgment: you can make architectural decisions, communicate trade-offs, and build systems that other engineers can extend.
Are comfortable with ambiguity, able to reason from first principles, and excited to build infrastructure for AI systems that are actively used in production.
Designing data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, event-processing systems, or feedback loops for production data.
Building infrastructure around LLM-based products or agentic systems, including optimizing LLM usage, context windows, reasoning tokens, or model selection.
Working with production traces from complex distributed systems.
Building internal platforms for engineers, domain experts, or operations teams.
Using workflow orchestration systems such as Temporal or similar.
Familiarity with audit, finance, compliance, or other high-accuracy domains.
Experience in an early-stage startup or fast-moving engineering environment.
No-one checks every box. If you’ve shipped retrieval systems and like owning evaluations and pipelines, let’s talk.
High impact & growth: Shape strategy at a scaling AI startup from day one.
Mission-driven culture: Ambitious team valuing first-principles thinking and bold ideas.
Attractive compensation: competitive salary plus significant equity.
Best tools for the job: Generous coding tools budget so you can use the best tools for the job.
Startup perks: Flexible vacation, team lunches, retreats, central Berlin office.
First Call — Intro to Cortea with Liza
Second Call — Technical interview with Vlad
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.
We ship fast, and we intend to keep shipping fast. The consequence is that our system is outgrowing the amount of deliberate design that went into it. We run AI agents over customer documents in a domain where being wrong is expensive, and a lot of the load-bearing decisions about how those fit together are still implicit.
You will be making those decisions explicit and then making them hold. That means codifying golden paths, building the shared primitives and APIs that product engineers work on top of, owning the architecture of the system as a whole, and establishing what our reliability actually needs to be before an incident establishes it for us.
Platform at Cortea sits between software engineering, DevOps and SRE. Its customers are other engineers. This is not a DevOps role under a different name: you will spend more time in application code than in YAML, and the reason we want infrastructure experience is that we don't believe you can design a system well without being able to run it.
The bar we are hiring against is someone who has taken a system from nothing to production and owned it end to end. You picked the technology, argued the tradeoffs in writing, provisioned the infrastructure, and were responsible for it when it broke.
We use AI heavily and we want you to. What we are not looking for is someone who outsources their judgment to it.
The mental model of this system has to live in your head, not in a context window. Use agents to move quickly on implementation. Do the design, the reasoning and the writing yourself, and be able to defend every decision you ship.
Four areas, roughly in the order you will spend time on them. You won't work on all of them at once, but you should be open to any of them.
Product platform. Make the easiest way for product engineers to do something (the paved road, or golden path) also the most secure, reliable and scalable way by default. Build the shared primitives, libraries and APIs that hide complexity and carry our quality and observability standards with them. Own the architecture and the core stack: what gets standardized, what gets reused, and where the system should be in eighteen months.
Infrastructure, observability and reliability. Infrastructure as code by default, from cloud resources through to dashboards and alerts. Provision, run and tune our Kubernetes cluster and cloud footprint, and keep CI fast as the deploy rate grows. Define SLIs for the workloads that
matter, build SLOs on top of them, and make the alerting high-signal enough that people trust it. Drive down AI and infrastructure spend.
Security and compliance. Keep the internal foundations secure by default: IAM, dependency management, secrets. Own the authentication and authorization stack, including ReBAC models covering both humans and agents. Implement SOC 2 and ISO 27001 controls without taxing every future change.
AI dev tooling. Keep product engineers and their agents on the paved road by making sure the documentation and agent guidelines they need are in place. Shorten the path from design to implementation with standardized automations and development environments that stay close to production.
A system of record for managing and distributing constantly evolving agent configurations, under strict auditability and tenant isolation requirements
The harnesses powering our AI agents, abstracting over use cases that change faster than the code
Centralized progress tracking that holds up across a growing number of parallel agent executions
Usage-based tenant billing with quotas and rate limiting across a growing set of products
SLIs for the background job system behind our agents (execution latency, AI spend, memory, CPU), then fixing the bottlenecks they expose at both the application and infrastructure level
A document pipeline handling dozens of file formats, very large spreadsheets and hundreds of parallel uploads, under a strong reliability requirement
Have designed, built and operated distributed systems end to end, and enjoy understanding how every part interacts with the rest
Are strong at backend software engineering and at DevOps/SRE, and don't think of those as separate jobs
Write design docs, RFCs, ADRs, postmortems
Reach for simple, boring solutions first, can tell essential complexity from accidental, and know which corners are safe to cut and which ones compound
Can turn a hard problem on its head and find the alternative nobody proposed
Concretely, you have scaled Postgres or another relational transactional database under real load, run production Kubernetes, and built observability rather than inherited it: SLIs, SLOs, distributed tracing.
No one checks every box. If you have designed a system from scratch, run it in production, and can explain in writing why it is shaped the way it is, let's talk.
Durable workflow orchestrators like Temporal, and background job and queue processing generally
Infrastructure for LLM-based products or agentic systems
Audit, finance, compliance, or another high-accuracy domain
Azure and/or GCP
You would describe application code as someone else's responsibility. A large share of platform work here happens inside the product codebase.
Your answer to reliability is more process. We want guardrails, not gates.
You need a well-defined system to work in. Ours is not one yet, and shaping it is the job.
You own the brand and shape how the product feels. Work face-to-face with experienced founders and learn directly from customer insights.
Real influence on strategy. In a small team of excellent engineers and operators with high autonomy, you will shape product direction. Best idea wins, regardless of seniority.
Fast, ambitious, and fun team. Decisions get made in hours, not weeks. Rapid experimentation is the default.
Meaningful equity and competitive salary. You are one of the first to build this, and you share in the upside.
A mission that matters. Building intelligent systems for a $200bn industry. From Berlin, with AI at the core.
First Call — Intro to Cortea with Liza
Second Call — Technical interview with Dan
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