Senior Software Engineer (Full Stack)

Location: Remote from South Africa (CPT or JHB), Kenya, Egypt, or Nigeria

Company

Join an early-stage, AI-native German start-up building digital infrastructure for grant funding through AI-supported research, matching, application drafting, and expert review.

What you will do

• Own product features end-to-end, from discovery with the grant team through frontend, backend, infrastructure, and production.
• Turn ambiguous business problems into technical plans, ship initial versions quickly, and iterate based on feedback.
• Advance the AI pipeline through prompt engineering, context management, cost control, and multi-provider integration across AWS Bedrock, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
• Build the AI evaluation practice, including prompt quality assessment, model selection, and regression detection.
• Operate, monitor, and debug production systems using Sentry, CloudWatch, and PostgreSQL performance analysis.
• Shape architecture, code quality, engineering standards, technical direction, usability, reliability, and automation.

Requirements

• At least 2 years in a senior engineering role, with a track record of owning products or major features end-to-end.
• Start-up or scale-up experience solving unclear business problems without a detailed specification and shipping working solutions quickly.
• Several years of professional TypeScript and Node.js experience, plus strong PostgreSQL knowledge including JSONB, query performance, and migrations.
• Full-stack experience with Next.js, React Query, Express, BullMQ, and AWS infrastructure including ECS and RDS.
• Hands-on experience building and running AI pipelines in production beyond simply calling an API.
• Daily use of AI-native development tools such as Claude Code or Cursor.
• Clear written and spoken English required, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical founders.
• High ownership, independent problem-solving, proposal-driven communication, and comfort working without detailed direction.

Nice to have

• German at B1 level or above; this is a plus, not a requirement.
• Production experience with AI agents and tool-calling workflows.
• Experience with Terraform.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote full-time role with a 40-hour work week.
• Work directly with founders and closely with the grant-writing team, without designers or product managers between engineering and users.
• Small engineering team with significant influence over product and engineering practices.
• Collaborative remote work culture, competitive compensation, and professional development opportunities.