Your mission
You'll be responsible for the technical backbone of our product—shaping architecture decisions, evolving production systems, and setting the engineering standard as our team grows:
* Define and evolve our backend architecture—making strategic decisions on service boundaries, data flows, and scaling patterns.
* Design and build high-throughput content ingestion and transformation pipelines that reliably process thousands of articles daily.
* Own the full lifecycle of our core API services (FastAPI)—from design through deployment to operational excellence.
* Establish backend engineering standards: code quality, testing strategies, documentation practices, and review processes.
* Drive infrastructure decisions—evaluate trade-offs between cloud services, optimize costs, and ensure our systems are observable and resilient.
* Mentor and guide future engineering hires as the team scales.
Your profile
Technical Expertise:
* 5+ years of professional Python development, with significant experience designing and operating production backend systems
* Deep knowledge of async frameworks (FastAPI or equivalent) and RESTful API design
* Strong data modeling skills—MongoDB or other document/NoSQL databases at scale
* Solid understanding of distributed systems patterns: queues, event-driven architectures, idempotency, graceful degradation
AI & Platform:
* Hands-on experience integrating and orchestrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar) in production
* Familiarity with LangSmith, LangChain, or comparable orchestration/observability tooling
* Ability to reason about prompt engineering trade-offs, token economics, and model selection
* Up to date and clear on pros and cons of agent-assisted software developement
DevOps & Infrastructure:
* Production AWS experience (ECS, Lambda, S3, SQS, or similar services)
* Docker, CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), infrastructure-as-code
* Hands-on with monitoring, logging, and alerting—you've been on-call and know what matters when things break
How You Work:
* You think in systems, not just features—anticipating failure modes and scaling bottlenecks before they hit
* You make pragmatic trade-offs between moving fast and building for durability
* You communicate technical decisions clearly, both in writing and in conversation
* You've operated in environments where you had to define process, not just follow it
* You love to deploy as often as you can and to test in production
Experience in early-stage or high-growth startups is a strong plus. You excel at taking ownership, handling ambiguity, and understand that sometimes you have to throw away your own code.
How we define success:
* You've established architectural patterns and engineering practices that the team builds on confidently.
* The systems you own run reliably in production with clear observability—issues are caught before users notice.
* Your technical judgment earns trust across the team, and your decisions hold up as we scale.
* Editors and internal users experience a noticeably more stable, faster product.
Why us?
* Shape the technical foundation of a product used by major German publishers.
* Be the senior engineering voice in a small, high-impact team with direct influence on product and architecture.
* Support trustworthy journalism in the age of AI.
* Berlin-based hybrid setup with genuine home office flexibility.
* Early-stage equity opportunity—your work directly drives company value.
About us
BeatSquares transforms large content archives into new formats to reach audiences. A single story can now reach everyone. Our mission is to bring trusted journalistic information and factual content exactly where people need it—through a scalable, modern platform.