Staff Engineer (m/f/x)

QUICK FACTS:

🚀 What WE do at Tendos

We are Tendos, a Munich-based startup, offering agentic workforce for white-collar jobs in construction. Our AI-first solution streamlines and automates tendering and quoting related workflows in the construction industry. Tendos is freeing inside sales teams from tedious manual tasks while unlocking new revenue potential. Take the unique opportunity and join one of the hottest early-stage start-ups to redefine workflows with AI in the biggest industry in the world!

🚀 The role

Most ads like this one say the founder wants out of the technology. Here it is the other way round, and it is the most important sentence on the page: our CTO is deeply involved in the technology and will stay that way.

This is a purely technical leadership role: no reports, no people management. What you take on is the architecture and technical direction of a platform that has outgrown one person, and of a team building on it every day. You stay hands-on: you design, and you write code that goes to production.

🥇 What YOU will do at Tendos

Set technical direction across the platform. You own the architecture and the technical standards of the platform, beyond a single feature and beyond the current quarter. You make the technology calls (patterns, frameworks, tooling, build or buy), lead design reviews, and balance what we need to ship now against what the system has to carry in two years.

Take the hardest problems, design through production. The ones where after two weeks it still isn't clear whether the approach holds, and where getting it wrong is expensive to undo.

Raise the standard. Not line by line in code review, but in how technical work gets done here: how a problem is framed, which options are weighed, and which solution fits the job at hand. You set that bar, and you set it by example.

Mentor and sponsor. Hand over the visible, career-making piece of work rather than keeping it, and argue for that person in rooms they are not in.

Turn open debates into decisions. A technical argument that has run for three weeks is a cost. You write the options down, make the call legible and get the team moving again.

Bring the engineering view into product and customer decisions. What is cheap, what is expensive, and what a promise to a customer costs the platform later.

Do the unglamorous work too. The migration, the flaky test suite, the maintenance a team this size has nobody spare to absorb. Unprompted, and in your first quarter rather than once you have settled in.

💪🏼 What we are looking for

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to own the architecture and technical direction of our platform. You will do that without a single report, in a company of under 20 people on its way to becoming the market leader for AI Agents in the construction space.

Eight or more years building software, several of them at a level where your judgement set the direction for people other than yourself.

You have been the technical owner of a system other people depended on - and can say what you got wrong in its design.

You have led the architecture and design of a production system, from the first design decision to running it under real load, and you can explain the trade-offs you made.

You can explain a technical trade-off to people who are not engineers, whether product, sales or a customer, so that they can decide with it.

You have changed a technical direction you had no formal authority over. We will ask who disagreed and what actually changed their mind.

You have made a team measurably better. Engineers you worked with can name something they do differently because of you, and you have introduced a pattern a team actually adopted rather than just discussed.

You are pragmatic about quality. Where it is worth spending is a judgement call, not an absolute: risk, reversibility and customer impact decide. You can defend a deliberate shortcut as the right call, and equally defend holding the line.

You have worked in at least two or three codebases you did not write

Strong Python, and experience with LLM-based systems in production: retrieval, evaluation, and a feel for why "it works on my machine" is not a statement about these systems.

AI coding tools in your daily work today - not tried, used. We will ask you to show how they changed the way you engineer.

Munich, hybrid. English is required, German is a plus.

No staff title at a previous employer required. What interests us is the scope you actually held, not what the ladder called it. If you carried that scope as a "Senior", apply.

❤️ Why you should join

We'll treat you well. If there are any other benefits that are important to you, we'd like to hear.

Competitive salary and equity — a competitive salary and meaningful equity in a growing, venture-backed startup. We tell you both numbers on the first call, not the last.

The data is the part that is hard to buy — a corpus of customer catalogues, a rule graph derived from corrections by the people who own the commercial consequence of a mistake, and labelled examples that are a by-product of customers doing their job rather than an annotation contract.

Bring an established industry into the modern era - Rethinking RFQs in the construction industry with cutting edge technology

Central Office — Work at our office in the heart of Munich (Königsplatz).

Team Culture — Regular team events, offsites, and a collaborative, transparent work environment where your voice is heard.

🤝 The Interview Process

At Tendos, we like to keep processes lean. That’s why our hiring process also follows a simple five-step-approach:

30-45 minute Screening Call with one of the founders.

45-minute Technical Interview with our CTO to understand how your gears grind.

Time-boxed Take-Home System Design Challenge

Design Review with CTO and one Senior Engineer

Final Interview to clarify the last contractual and administrative details

📮 Interested to join the ride?

Drop us some lines along with your CV, a short description of a system you owned or a technical decision you drove (a link to your Github-repository is welcome too), as well as your desired start date directly to our founder: matthias@tendos.ai

At Tendos, we are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applications from all qualified candidates.