Founding Software Engineer

tl;dr
Kuro is building the AI automation platform for the back-office of construction companies. Our applied AI product is already live at leading construction enterprises, delivering a 90% efficiency increase. We are looking for a founding software engineer to help us build out our platform in Berlin.

Berlin, 80k€ +/- 20% (based on experience), 0.5% – 1.5% equity

About Kuro
Kuro was founded by Lea & Jonas, who’ve built construction tech scale up alcemy and Capmo before. Kuro is building the AI automation platform for construction companies. We help construction professionals to utilize their biggest data source – the 95% of unstructured data. Our entry is in the estimation (quoting) process, the core and most expensive back office process. Our product extracts information from the project input, identifies building components automatically and enriches it back into a 3D model. Saving up to 90% time.

Leading construction enterprises with a combined construction volume >30 billion annually use Kuro already today.

We just raised a pre-seed round from the leading global construction tech VC and are looking to grow our team in Berlin. You would be one of our first hires – we’ve been early employees before. Joining an early stage startup was the best decision we ever took and we are excited to pay it forward.

Learn more: Join Kuro – Hiring Founding Engineers [Berlin]

About the role

Your responsibilities
You will own and operate our data pipelines, add new features to it and improve existing ones. Each project from our customers consists of 300 – 3000 files ranging from PDFs, over construction drawings, scans etc. A performant data ingestion is the foundation for everything we are building thus has a high impact on our accuracy, ROI and user experience.

You will be working closely with Jonas (CPTO) who owns tech and product.

Role and responsibilities

Develop Scalable Data Pipelines and Integrations

• Create and optimize systems to process diverse unstructured document types, including PDFs, scans, and construction drawings.
• Build integrations for structured data sources and customer systems, ensuring seamless data flow.

Design and Implement Distributed Infrastructure

• Architect and deploy a distributed, scalable, and secure infrastructure capable of hosting and processing large datasets efficiently.

Adapt Customer Ontologies

• Translate and implement customer-specific data structures (ontologies) into Kuro’s systems to enable fast development of new AI use-cases

Build end-to-end features

• Designing and implementing new features to solve a specific user problem such as file navigation

Past and current projects you would have been involved in

• Built pipelines to process 10+ file types efficiently.
• Developed systems to classify and organize datasets of 3,000+ files.
• Image/figure processing and embedding with vision models
• Worked on contextual embedding and document chunking for content extraction [https://www.anthropic.com/news/contextual-retrieva]

Current Tech Stack

It is still day 0 for Kuro. Therefore we are highly pragmatic with our tool choices. We believe in keeping it simple and moving quickly. You significantly help shape our tech stack decisions.

• Web-App: Retool
• Cloud Functions: Retool / Supabase
• Database / Vector DB and File Storage: Supabase (postgress / pgvector) / AWS S3
• Backend (Document Pipelines & applied AI): Fast API / Python
• Hosting: Railway
• AI: Azure / OpenAI, Gemini, Cohere
• Eval. & Tracking: Langfuse

Your opportunity
You are joining Kuro among the first hires maybe even first hire. You will have significant influence over our product and how we build it and will be incentivized as such.

Your decisions and code will lay the foundation for Kuro, requiring a balance between fast iteration and delivering value to our customers, managing technical debt, and planning for scale.

You’ll own key parts of Kuro end-to-end, with the freedom to grow as a top individual contributor or take on managerial responsibilities over time. This is your chance to shape both your career and the future of Kuro.

Your profile

This is the perfect role for an experienced engineer who wants to join an early stage company that builds a high impact applied AI product

• You thrive working in a small and accountable team with a lot of ownership
• You want to take full ownership in solving customer problems by designing and implementing features
• You are passionate about the potential of GenAI, a strong believer in its transformative power, and eager to explore how it can be applied to solve real-world challenges in the construction industry
• You have at least 3+ years of experience as a (backend) software engineer in a fast paced environment
• You are fluent in both spoken and written English
• You are happy to work onsite at our office (Berlin, 13355) on a daily basis
• You have impressive achievements from previous careers and from side projects — we’re excited to hear about these!

Bonus Points

• You’ve started a company before or worked at a very early stage startup
• Experience with language models and vision models
• German-speaking

Team, Values & Benefits

We work in-person from our office in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg. You must be willing to be located in Berlin. We aim for 4-5 days in the office a week.

Our goal is to build a small, highly motivated team of smart, kind, and driven individuals who are eager to learn, embrace challenges, and challenge others in return. We value pragmatic people who are unafraid to take ownership and decisions.

• We plan on only hiring engineers for the foreseeable future
• We are strongly focused on delivering value to our enterprise customers fast
• We plan to have as little overhead as possible
  • We set weekly goals and work towards them
  • You can expect to have ~1 meeting a day on average
  • No over-blown structures or planning sessions

About the process

• Intro Call – Intro, Logistics & Fit with Lea (30min)
• Second Call – Get to know Product and Tech at Kuro with Jonas (30min)
• Third Call – Technical Interview: Coding challenge and Systems Design (90min)
• On-site Day (0.5-1 day)
  • We will get together in our office in Berlin and work together on a real problem for a day.
  • This will include planing, building and shipping a small feature.
• Decision