Founding Engineer (Backend, Infrastructure, AI)

Join Blue Guardrails as our third team member and shape our product, infrastructure, and team culture across backend, cloud, and AI systems.

Blue Guardrails, founded in 2025, builds a product at the intersection of AI observability, evaluation, and reliability that allows engineering teams to build AI systems that are consistent and dependable.

You will help us build this company as the third team member, shaping our product and our team culture. We want to create a company that is successful because we all enjoy our work. We believe in ownership, focus, and coming together as a real team. We take pride in what we build and have fun while doing so.

What you will do

You're joining us to expand our AI reliability platform and create a product that our customers come back to everyday. In zero‑to‑one fashion, you'll explore, adapt, and deliver across different domains: we're thinking of the role as an infrastructure‑savvy backend engineer with a strong interest in AI.

• Expand the product: discover user needs, ideate, make plans, ship an elegant solution.
• Ensure a solid foundation: improve our infrastructure‑as‑code setup (Azure).
• Enable private deployments: plan and implement a private deployment in a customer's cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP).
• Make AI do more: improve our agent‑as‑a‑judge pipeline, design thorough evaluation strategies, experiment with models or prompts.

Our stack

We follow a modern software development life cycle with tech choices that allow us to move fast without accumulating unwarranted complexity. Our code is versioned, well tested, and deployed to a cloud environment via CI/CD. Our infrastructure is managed through code.

• Backend: Python / FastAPI, async workers (Redis Streams).
• Data: Postgres, object storage.
• Infrastructure: IaC, Docker / Kubernetes, Azure Container Apps.
• LLMs: Azure Foundry, AWS Bedrock, VertexAI, PydanticAI.

Requirements

• Professional experience in software engineering (Python).
• Experience in creating solid data architectures and writing performant queries.
• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, Bicep, ...).
• Experience with Docker / Kubernetes.
• Experience in operating and maintaining production software.
• Experience in building AI agents or observability products is a plus.

We want to hear from you regardless of age, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or socioeconomic status. We're particularly interested in applications from people underrepresented in tech and AI.

What we offer

• Competitive salary.
• Equity participation as part of the compensation package.
• Annual professional development budget.
• 30 days of PTO.
• Hybrid work arrangement: regular presence in our Berlin office (S Friedrichstraße) with flexibility for remote work.

About us

Blue Guardrails was founded in 2025 by Miriam Kümmel and Mathis Lucka. We spent years as AI engineers and product leaders helping dozens of enterprise customers build RAG applications, chatbots, and agents. They all struggled with a lack of systematic visibility into and control over the quality of their AI applications. Does the LLM adhere to the prompt? Are there any hallucinations in the replies of the chatbot? How much of the context passed is actually being utilized? We set out to close this gap, so teams can stop manually spot‑checking their AI applications and start to systematically observe, evaluate, and improve them, pre‑ and post‑deployment.

Blue Guardrails is based in Berlin.

This position requires valid EU work authorization and is based in Berlin. We review applications on a rolling basis.