Founding Software Engineer

Kuro is building the AI automation platform for the backoffice of construction companies. Our applied AI product is already live at leading construction enterprises delivering a 90% efficiency increase. We are looking for a founding software engineer to help us build out our platform in Berlin.

Location: Berlin

Salary: 80k / 20% (based on experience) 0.5% 1.5% equity

About Kuro

Kuro was founded by Lea & Jonas who have built construction tech scale-ups alcemy and Capmo before. Kuro is building the AI automation platform for construction companies. We help construction professionals to utilize their biggest data source: the 95% of unstructured data. Our entry is in the estimation (quoting) process, the core and most expensive back office process. Our product extracts information from the project input, identifies building components automatically, and enriches it back into a 3D model, saving up to 90% time.

Leading construction enterprises with a combined construction volume > 30 billion annually use Kuro already today.

We just raised a pre-seed round from the leading global construction tech VC and are looking to grow our team in Berlin. You would be one of our first hires; we've been early employees before. Joining an early stage startup was the best decision we ever took and we are excited to pay it forward.

About the Role

Your Responsibilities

• You will own and operate our data pipelines, add new features to it, and improve existing ones. Each project from our customers consists of files ranging from PDFs to construction drawings, scans, etc. A performant data ingestion is the foundation for everything we are building, thus has a high impact on our accuracy, ROI, and user experience.
• You will be working closely with Jonas (CPTO) who owns tech and product.

Role and Responsibilities

• Designing and implementing new features to solve specific user problems such as file navigation or document highlighting.
• From concept to DB schema to UI, own the full development lifecycle of customer-facing use cases.

Manage our Web Application and APIs

• Maintain our low-code Retool application and improve security and performance.
• In the mid setup our web application from scratch and build out existing and new features.

Design and Implement Distributed Infrastructure

• Architect and deploy a distributed, scalable, and secure infrastructure capable of hosting and processing large datasets efficiently.

Develop Scalable Data Pipelines and Integrations

• Create and optimize systems to process diverse unstructured document types including PDFs, scans, and construction drawings.
• Build integrations for structured data sources and customer systems ensuring seamless data flow between Kuro and our customers.

Past and Current Projects You Would Have Been Involved In

• Developed systems to classify and organize project folders of 3000 files.
• Implemented a queuing service and logging to process large amounts of documents.
• Selected and integrated a data pipeline orchestration tool.
• Document chunk highlighting in PDF viewer.
• Implemented a global document search functionality via FastAPI in our web application.

It is still day 0 for Kuro. Therefore we are highly pragmatic with our tool choices. We believe in keeping it simple and moving quickly. You significantly help shape our tech stack decisions.

• WebApp: Retool (low-code including custom React component)
• Cloud Functions: Retool / Supabase
• Database / Vector DB and File Storage: Supabase (PostgreSQL) / Weaviate / AWS S3
• Hosting: Railway
• Eval. & Tracking: Langfuse

Requirements

Your Opportunity

You are joining Kuro among the first hires, maybe even first hire. You will have significant influence over our product and how we build it and will be incentivized as such.

Your decisions and code will lay the foundation for Kuro, requiring a balance between fast iteration and delivering value to our customers, managing technical debt, and planning for scale.

You’ll own key parts of Kuro end-to-end with the freedom to grow as a top individual contributor or take on managerial responsibilities over time. This is your chance to shape both your career and the future of Kuro.

Your Profile

This is the perfect role for an experienced engineer who wants to join an early stage company that builds a high impact applied AI product.

• You thrive working in a small and accountable team with a lot of ownership.
• You want to take full ownership in solving customer problems by designing and implementing features.
• You are passionate about the potential of GenAI, a strong believer in its transformative power, and eager to explore how it can be applied to solve real-world challenges in the construction industry.
• You have at least 2 years of experience as a (full-stack) software engineer in a fast-paced environment.
• You are fluent in both spoken and written English.
• You are happy to work onsite at our office (Berlin 13355) on a daily basis.
• You have impressive achievements from previous careers and from side projects; we’re excited to hear about these!

Bonus Points

• You’ve started a company before or worked at a very early stage startup.
• German-speaking.

We work in-person from our office in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg. You must be willing to be located in Berlin. We aim for 4-5 days in the office a week.

Our goal is to build a small, highly motivated team of smart, kind, and driven individuals who are eager to learn, embrace challenges, and challenge others in return. We value pragmatic people who are unafraid to take ownership and make decisions.

• We plan on only hiring engineers for the foreseeable future.
• We are strongly focused on delivering value to our enterprise customers fast.
• We plan to have as little overhead as possible.
• We set weekly goals and work towards them.
• You can expect to have 1 meeting a day on average.
• No overblown structures or planning sessions.

About the Process

• Intro Call: Intro Logistics & Fit with Lea (30min)
• Second Call: Get to know Product and Tech at Kuro with Jonas (30min)
• Third Call: Technical Interview: Coding challenge and Systems Design (90min)
• Onsite Day (0.5-1 day): We will get together in our office in Berlin and work together on a real problem for a day. This will include planning, building, and shipping a small feature.

Key Skills

Employment Type: Full Time

Experience: years

Vacancy: 1

Software Engineer • Berlin, Berlin, Germany