Founding Senior Software Engineer (Germany)

Clipbook
Germany
On-siteCareer-pivot friendly

Who this role is best for

A natural match if you have experience building scalable AI systems and working in fast-paced startup environments.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with a track record of building scalable AI systems in production environments
    — “Integrate AI into real-world workflows. Put LLMs and ML models into production for real workflows”
  • Engineers with a strong background in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure
    — “Experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and CI/CD”

Things to consider

  • The role demands a high level of ownership and decision-making in system architecture
    — “Architect & build core systems. Drive key decisions across our stack and own feature development end-to-end”

How to stand out

  • Highlight end-to-end feature ownership and production AI/ML deployment experience
    — “own feature development end-to-end”
  • Emphasize hands-on experience with RAG pipelines, embeddings, and fine-tuning models
    — “Put LLMs and ML models into production for real workflows: RAG pipelines, embeddings, prompt execution, agentic systems, fine-tuned models”
  • Showcase a history of designing systems that scale with high-volume and fault tolerance
    — “Design systems that scale. Build systems that will hold up as we grow 10x”
  • Demonstrate strong communication skills through project documentation and collaboration examples
    — “Excellent communication skills”
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · Team

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • Developed and shipped new features and capabilities
  • Integrated AI into real-world workflows
  • Built scalable and performant systems
Typical background
Experience in building and scaling production systemsExperience with cloud infrastructure and containerization

Skills & requirements

Required

Architecting SystemsBuilding Core SystemsIntegrating AI Into WorkflowsDesigning Scalable SystemsDeveloping Performant ApisCloud InfrastructureContainerizationCi/cd PipelinesBackend DevelopmentData EngineeringDistributed SystemsAi/ml

Preferred

Llms In ProductionRAG PipelinesEmbeddingsFine-tuningInference OptimizationPythonTypeScriptPostgreSQLHigh-concurrency Systems

Stack & domain

Architecting SystemsBuilding Core SystemsIntegrating AIDesigning Scalable SystemsDeveloping Performant ApisCloud InfrastructureContainerizationCI/CDData EngineeringDistributed SystemsAi/mlBackend DevelopmentLeadershipCommunicationExcitement To Build QuicklySoftware EngineeringAICloud

About the role

Original posting from Clipbook via Ashby

ABOUT CLIPBOOK

Clipbook’s mission: reinvent how leaders listen to and engage with the world of information that comes out every day.

Our platform ingests, comprehends, summarizes, and surfaces insights and actions from traditional news, TV, podcast, social media, and internet data at scale—across text, audio, and video in real time.

We launched in 2023 and have grown to 200+ clients including BCG, Weber Shandwick, and dozens of government agencies. We bootstrapped to seven-figures in ARR before raising a $3.3M seed round (co-led by Mark Cuban and a host of prominent angels and VCs).

Our founding team has backgrounds at BCG, Bain, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the White House, and Congress, and has previously built startups backed by Sequoia, Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Coatue, and NFX.

THE ROLE

You'd be a key contributor at Clipbook — joining a small but mighty engineering team with engineers from Meta, Stripe, and AWS. You'll have the opportunity to develop new features and capabilities, and what you build will ship to 200+ customers quickly.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

  • Architect & build core systems. Drive key decisions across our stack and own feature development end-to-end.
  • Integrate AI into real-world workflows. Put LLMs and ML models into production for real workflows: RAG pipelines, embeddings, prompt execution, agentic systems, fine-tuned models.
  • Design systems that scale. Build systems that will hold up as we grow 10x, while being practical about what to invest in now vs. what can wait.
  • Develop performant APIs and services. Create robust interfaces and internal services that power our product end-to-end, ensuring reliability, security, and a seamless experience for customers.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

  • 3+ years building and scaling production systems. Strong across backend fundamentals (services, data models, distributed systems), with deeper expertise in one or more areas — and a desire to keep expanding your breadth over time.
  • Genuine excitement to build quickly & ship fast. We care about getting things into users' hands and iterating from there.
  • Experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and CI/CD. Familiarity with AWS/GCP, containerization (Docker/K8s), and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Excellent communication skills

TECHNICAL AREAS WHERE DEPTH MATTERS (ONE OR MORE)

  • Data Engineering: Spark, Kafka, Flink, BigQuery, streaming pipelines, ETL at scale.
  • Distributed Systems: High-volume scaling, fault tolerance, eventual consistency.
  • AI/ML: LLMs in production, RAG, embeddings, fine-tuning, inference optimization.
  • Backend: Python, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, high-concurrency systems.

Source: Clipbook careers (Ashby)

Similar roles

More roles at Clipbook