Founding Head of Engineering/ CTO (m/w/x) - Saas B2B Start up (Berlin)

Cherry Ventures is supporting our portfolio with this hire

About us

We're Cortea, a Berlin-based startup transforming audits through AI technology.

The challenge: Manual audits of unstructured data and documents frustrate both auditors and regulated companies at huge cost, while demand for audits continues to skyrocket.

Our solution: AI-powered software and specialized AI-agents for auditors streamlining workflows and eliminating all repetitive tasks. Starting with IT audits for regulated companies.

With multi-million Euro funding from top-tier VCs, a working AI product, and paying customers, we're now expanding our product and scaling the team.

We value first-principles thinking, speed, trust, and the joy of tackling big challenges together!

What You’ll Do

As our Founding Head of Engineering / CTO, you'll own all things engineering, work on strategy, and empower our team to deliver on our ambitious vision.

• Own and define our technical architecture and roadmap, turning business and user challenges into scalable solutions
• Build, mentor, grow, and empower our engineering team (starting with 4+ engineers)
• Stay hands-on with coding, ensuring best practices with a modern tech stack
• Drive AI innovation and experimentation (LLMs, RAG) to keep us ahead of the curve
• Create a positive, engineering-driven culture, fostering innovation and pragmatism
• Shape company strategy and direction together with our two existing co-founders

Tech stack: Python, TypeScript, Postgres, GCP, Terraform, RPC-based APIs, and RAG pipelines (we're open to evolve, but some familiarity is expected)

As part of our Founding team, you'll shape our technology, our team, and our culture from the ground up. We want you involved in every discussion and decision!

Who You Are

• Deep technical background: You've owned architecture end-to-end and still get your hands dirty with code
• Proven leadership experience (Engineering Lead, Head of Eng, VP Eng, CTO) with a talent for scaling teams in fast-paced environments
• Ability to bridge technical decisions with high-level business goals and customer needs
• Proven track record of driving results and fostering a culture of excellence
• Experience building SaaS solutions, managing cloud platforms like GCP, improving developer experience, and working with data-first solutions
• Positive, direct, and no-BS style of communication
• You enjoy working office-based with our team to build the product collaboratively
• (Bonus) Experience with LLMs/RAG-based solutions
• (Bonus) Entrepreneurial experience or broad leadership across multiple teams

If in doubt, we don’t expect you to have experience in all these areas, but are looking for talented leaders who are passionate about learning, building, and delivering impactful solutions.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary and significant equity stake
• Flexible holiday policy, team meals and offsites, learning budgets, and other benefits

We value diversity and inclusion, building a team with varied backgrounds and perspectives.

Interview process

• First Call — Intro on what we do with Valentin
• Second Call — Get to know our Product and Culture with Philipp
• Third Call — Technical Interview with one of our Technical Angels
• On-site Visit — Meet our team in Berlin and collaborate on a real problem

Cherry Ventures is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.