Mercura is hiring a Founding Staff Engineer to be the technical backbone of a small, fast-moving engineering organization, owning high-leverage systems across multiple products. This hands-on role combines deep technical ownership, cross-product architecture, and mentorship to raise the bar on quality, reliability, and AI capabilities.

What you'll do

• Serve as the technical backbone across multiple products and development streams.
• Own the most complex, highest-leverage engineering work: core systems, shared frameworks, and critical infrastructure.
• Define and evolve architecture decisions that prevent long-term dead-ends across products.
• Spend the majority of time writing and shipping production code, leading by example.
• Eliminate technical debt by refactoring abstractions and raising reliability and engineering standards.
• Mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and direct feedback to improve team output and reduce hidden risk.
• Contribute to the architecture and implementation of Mercura's AI capabilities, including LLM pipelines and data infrastructure.

What Mercura is looking for

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of solving genuinely hard technical problems in production.
• Deep full-stack expertise with strong backend, API, and infrastructure skills; comfortable on the frontend when needed (Python, React, TypeScript).
• Proven experience designing and evolving systems across multiple products and teams.
• Demonstrated ability to improve system performance, reliability, and scalability at scale.
• Cloud and DevOps fluency: containerization (Docker), cloud platforms (Azure/AWS/GCP), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Experience building or integrating AI systems, LLMs, or large-scale data pipelines is a strong plus.
• Deep technical ownership and a tendency to notice and fix slipping quality without prompting.
• A leader who leads through doing, mentors by example, and multiplies team effectiveness.
• Mission-driven, pragmatic, and decisive under uncertainty, willing to work in-person in Munich with intensity beyond a typical 9–5.