Staff Engineer

Academic Key; Berlin; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Andercore is seeking a Staff Engineer to own the architecture across teams, guiding the evolution of a fast-growing trading platform. You will drive design decisions, write code, and ensure reliability and security in critical transaction systems.

You will mentor engineers, shape the migration of core components and establish strong observability and incident response. Berlin-based, full-time, backend-focused role.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of production software experience with backend systems.
• Strong backend design skills and architecture experience.
• Experience with Java or comparable languages at scale.
• Focus on reliability, security and observability in systems.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture across teams; define target architecture and RFCs.
• Lead critical engineering work from design to production.
• Shape the core transaction system and ensure migration without disruption.
• Mentor engineers and help hire by defining excellence in engineering.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Backend Design

Distributed Systems

Reliability

Security

Mentoring

Kotlin

Tools

Terraform

GitHub Actions

TypeScript

Node.js

Next.js

React

Salesforce

Job description

About Andercore Andercore is the AI-native supplier of industrial materials and goods for energy and infrastructure. We execute trade and distribution end-to-end, on our own account, at the speed of compute - and we are becoming the supplier of record for the entire industry. Industrial procurement is a €900B market in Europe alone and the largest manual market on earth. 95% of customers have no direct access to global supply chains. Materials pass through four or five intermediaries before they reach a site, and 40% of the margin evaporates on the way. For decades, the operating system of this industry was people: people to source, negotiate, finance, ship, and sell. We built the alternative from scratch. We are the supplier. We buy from global sources and sell to European customers on our own account. Our AI runs the full trade: sourcing, quality, pricing, sales, logistics, credit, and financing. One request. A firm quote in minutes. Delivered on time. For the customer, it feels like buying from their preferred local supplier. No warehouses. No fleet. No inventory risk. Every trade is pre-sold before it is bought. We are also the credit counterparty. Customers are scored and insured in minutes and get up to 60 days of payment terms priced into the quote itself. The working capital behind every trade is bank-funded, not equity-funded. Where we are today: Strong triple-digit-million euro turnover run rate, the majority of it from repeat customers Seven European markets live, sourced from suppliers across Asia and beyond 80+ people across Berlin (HQ), London, and Shanghai $90M raised in equity and debt, including our $40M Series B, from Atomico, Project A, Target Global, and Inven Capital - with working capital facilities from UniCredit and KfW The margin is in the bits. The moat is in the atoms. We are building the supplier of record for industrial materials - and redefining how global trade works in one of the largest and most essential industries on earth.

Staff Engineer

Andercore · Berlin

Abroad Berlin Full Time

About the role Andercore runs global trade end to end, from sourcing and pricing to sales, logistics and financing, and AI agents do a growing share of that work. Order values are high and prices and stock change daily, so the systems underneath have to be fast, correct and reliable at all times. As a Staff Engineer, you own our hardest technical problems and set the architecture across teams. You focus on what a fast-growing trading business cannot afford to get wrong: speed, reliability, security and observability. You report to our VP Engineering and work closely with our Senior Product Engineers, QA and product managers. You stay hands-on: you write code, review designs and raise the bar for everyone around you.

Tech stack Java 21 and Spring Boot 3, Python, LangGraph and LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini), PostgreSQL, Kinesis, AWS with Terraform, GitHub Actions, and TypeScript with Node.js, Next.js and React. Including Salesforce, which we are moving our transaction core out of.

What you will do Set the technical direction across teams: define the target architecture, write the RFCs behind big decisions, and make sure teams build towards the same picture. Lead the hardest technical work yourself, from design to production, instead of only advising on it. Shape the carve-out of our transaction core from Salesforce into a modern, modular core system, with a migration path that never disrupts daily trading. Make reliability, security and observability part of how we build: monitoring, alerting, incident response and postmortems that lead to real changes. Design how our AI agents act safely on money-touching paths, with evaluations, guardrails, audit trails and human review where it matters. Set standards for correctness and data integrity, including idempotency, validation and testing, together with QA. Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and direct feedback, and help us hire by defining what great engineering looks like at Andercore.

In your first six months, you might Design the architecture of our pricing engine so it scales with a growing assortment and more markets, and serves correct prices to sales, and later directly to customers, in milliseconds. Lay out the target architecture and first steps for moving our transaction core off Salesforce. Build the observability and incident setup that lets us catch problems before customers or colleagues notice them.

What you bring At least 8 years of experience building and running software in production, including systems where errors cost real money. Deep backend expertise at production scale in Java or a comparable language such as Kotlin, C# or Go, and willingness to work in Java and Spring Boot. A track record of setting architecture across several teams, through influence rather than a management title. Experience designing transactional, distributed and event-driven systems, with a strong focus on correctness, failure modes and performance. Hands-on depth in reliability, security and ob

Academic Key will never request login credentials or application fees for this role.