Senior Backend & AI Engineer

The hardest part of a startup usually isn't the code. It's finding customers who really need what you build and getting them to change how they work. At Scalera, that part is done: manufacturers, suppliers and contractors across Switzerland, Austria and Germany already run their tenders through us every day.

What we need now are people who can take the next unsolved problem and turn it into a product customers can't do without. If you've founded a company (whether it worked out or not), been the first engineer somewhere, or built something people paid for, this role was written for you.

• You've taken something from zero to one: a company, a product line, or a side project with paying users
• You've built and run backend systems in production that other people depend on. We care more about your judgment than your language; you're strong in Go or Python and happy to work in both
• You're solid on data modeling, API design and messy real-world data
• You'd rather talk to a customer than wait for a spec
• You're comfortable with ambiguity. You can make progress while the problem is still half-defined, which at a startup it usually is
• You want a large scope of responsibility and are happy to own things well beyond your job title
• Rapidly changing requirements don't throw you. When customers or priorities shift, you adapt and keep going
• You enjoy direct customer contact and want to be on customer calls
• You make things simpler over time, not more clever
• You write clearly in English. German is a plus, not a requirement

• You just want to code and go home
• You don't like talking to customers, whether on calls or on the occasional site visit
• Ambiguity and chaos bother you
• You want a well-defined backlog handed to you
• Your main goal is managing people soon. Here, scope grows with what you own, not with headcount

Go and Python (FastAPI), PostgreSQL, GCP, and LLMs throughout the document pipeline. You don't need to know all of it on day one.

• Screening call (30 min) with our VP Engineering. It's two-way: ask us anything, including the hard questions.
• Technical deep-dive call: walk us through something you built from scratch, the decisions you made and what went wrong.
• Meet Scalera Day: come to our office in Zürich, work on a real problem with real (anonymized) construction documents, and meet the team.
• Offer: if it's a fit on both sides, we'll move quickly to an offer.

• Zürich HQ, four days in the office, Fridays remote
• Occasional customer visits across Switzerland, Austria and Germany
• Small team, no bureaucracy. You'll work directly with the CEO, CTO, VP Engineering and Customer Success
• Competitive salary and equity

Founders and former founders: if you're unsure whether you fit, send a few lines about what you built and why you moved on. We read every one.

Scalera is an ETH Zurich spin-off building AI for the €200B+ European construction industry. Large manufacturers and suppliers still run their most document-heavy processes by hand, from reading 300-page tenders to retyping purchase orders into their ERP. We automate them one by one. Our product matching already handles 1,400 tender positions in 16 minutes at 98% precision, work that used to take a sales rep most of a day.