AI Engineering Lead at Mercura (W25)
€80K - €130K EUR  •  
AI Quoting for distributors and manufacturers
Munich, BY, DE / Munich, Bavaria, DE
Full-time
US citizenship/visa not required
3+ years
About 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.

About the role
Skills: Next.js, Python, React, TypeScript, Machine Learning, Docker, Natural Language Processing, PostgreSQL

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, quadrupling our revenue in just 8 weeks. After YC, we closed a 8x oversubscribed round with top-tier investors and angels, and we contrinue 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.

What you will be working on

  • 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

What we're looking for

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
Technology

Software Stack: Typescript, Python, React, Next, Docker, Terraform, Postgres AI Stack: Vector databases, LLMs, Embeddings, observability & evals

Interview Process

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:

  1. A take-home exercise, including a short presentation and a live-coding session.
  2. 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.

Other jobs at Mercura

fulltimeMunich, BY, DE / Munich, Bavaria, DE€45K - €90K EUR1+ years

fulltimeMunich, BY, DE / Munich, Bavaria, DEFull stack€80K - €130K EUR3+ years

internMunich, BY, DE / Munich, Bavaria, DEFull stack€3K - €4K EURJunior and above

fulltimeMunich, BY, DE / Munich, Bavaria, DEFull stack€60K - €80K EUR1+ years

internMunich, BY, DE / Munich, Bavaria, DE€2.5K - €4K EURJunior and above

fulltimeMunich, BY, DE / Munich, Bavaria, DEFull stack€60K - €90K EUR3+ years

fulltimeMunich, BY, DE / Munich, Bavaria, DE€55K - €90K EUR1+ years

Hundreds of YC startups are hiring on Work at a Startup.

Sign up to see more ›