AI Engineering Lead at Mercura

Mercura automates quoting in the construction industry with AI agents. We rank in the top 5% of YC’s W25 batch by revenue, quadrupling our revenue in just 8 weeks. After YC, we closed a 8x oversubscribed round with top-tier investors and angels.

Mercura automates quoting in the construction industry with AI agents. Our software frees sales teams from manual back-office tasks and lets them process requests in minutes instead of days.

We rank in the top 5% of YC’s W25 batch by revenue. After YC, we closed a 8x oversubscribed round with top-tier investors and angels.

In just 7 months since founding, we are already on track to reach €1M ARR, and we continue to grow massively.

As the AI Engineering Lead, you will play a key role in architecting and building complex AI systems end-to-end. This is a hands-on leadership role for engineers with high-agency and strong technical depth. We’re looking for experienced builders with a strong product mindset and a track record of shipping complex AI systems.

If you are an experienced builder who thrives at the intersection of AI, ML, data engineering, and full-stack development - this is your opportunity to set the technical direction, mentor others, and shape how users interact with AI.

• Own the architecture and design of AI systems
• Collaborate with and lead other stellar engineers across the full stack
• Build, deploy and optimize AI agents end-to-end
• Work with embeddings and fine-tune LLMs for classification and reranking
• Optimize algorithms for product search
• Apply RLHF & DPO to align LLMs with human feedback
• Build data pipelines to process large-scale unstructured data efficiently
• Make our backend scalable, stable and efficient We are looking for senior engineers with a strong background in SWE, AI & ML - and the capability to lead the team and grow into a founding engineer role.

Technical skillset:

• Strong experience with NLP, LLMs, Embeddings, ML, and AI-powered applications

• Experience with full-stack software engineering (React, Typescript, Python)

• Proven track record of architecting and building complex, production-grade AI systems

• Cloud & DevOps: Experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), cloud infrastructure (Azure/AWS/GCP), and infrastructure as code (Terraform). Commitment & Mindset:

• High agency & initiative: You develop new ideas and drive them in execution under minimal guidance

• Mission-driven: You view Mercura as a long-term commitment and your job is one of your top priorities

• Product mindset: You demonstrate product thinking on a deep level and solve problems end-to-end

• You’re excited to iterate quickly and build software in a fast-paced startup environment

• You want to work in-person in Munich with more intensity than in a 9-5 job Leadership & Communication:

• You have experience in leading engineering teams as a senior/staff/lead engineer

• You have the potential to grow into the founding engineer role

• You’re one of the strongest engineers in the team and make everyone else better

• Everyone can come to you for advice on how to fix their hardest problems

• Clients respect your presence & technical expertise

• Free team dinner (up to 4x/week)

• UrbanSportsClub membership - join our team workouts 3x/week

• Easy relocation to Munich — our office is located in the Werk1 Startup Incubator, where you can rent a 1-bedroom apartment right next to the office for just €750/month

• Real shares in our company with the most favorable tax treatment - no VSOP/ESOP

• Access to any AI or productivity tools you need Software Stack: Typescript, Python, React, Next, Docker, Terraform, Postgres AI Stack: Vector databases, LLMs, Embeddings, observability & evals

Step 1: Intro call

Casual intro meeting with one of the founders to get to know each other and introduce Mercura

Step 2: Technical interview

💡 At Mercura, we value our applicants' time. That's why we compensate you with €50 if we ask you to complete a take-home challenge.

The technical interview consists of two parts:

• A take-home exercise, including a short presentation and a live-coding session.
• A system design interview. For the take-home exercise, we’d provide you with a task. You’ll have 2–3 hours to complete it, focusing on data and AI engineering (e.g., NLP, embeddings, LLMs). The challenge will be based on a practical problem we’ve encountered in our day-to-day work, so it should give you a realistic sense of what the role involves.

Later, you’ll present your results to us. The presentation will include a brief algorithmic live-coding challenge, similar to a competitive programming task.

Step 3: Meet the team

Meet the other co-founders and team members to get a feel for our culture and working style.

Step 4: Reference checks

Please provide 2–3 references so we can gather insights into your strengths and working style.

Step 5: Offer

If we see a great fit, you will get an offer, including a competitive compensation package with equity participation.