Founding Engineering Team Lead (gn) @ AI Cybersecurity Venture, Berlin

This is an Atlantic portfolio venture.

About the Venture

We are a recently funded cybersecurity startup based in Berlin, founded by experienced security leaders with backgrounds in Israeli intelligence. We are building a cyber risk platform that helps enterprises understand, measure, and reduce identity risk at scale. The goal is to turn complex identity and security data into clear, actionable risk insights that CISOs and CTOs can actually use. We work across cloud-native systems, AI-driven analysis, and automated enforcement through AI agents.

About the Role

This is a founding hire. You will be building the core platform from scratch, owning the architecture, and leading a small engineering team while writing code yourself most of the time. The role sits at the intersection of technical leadership and hands‑on engineering, with a strong lean towards the latter. You will report directly to the CEO and CPTO, with real influence over how the product and team take shape.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and review production backend and platform code, spending roughly 70% of your time writing Go

• Lead and grow a small engineering team while staying deeply involved in the technical work

• Own delivery of the engineering roadmap, balancing speed, quality, and security

• Set architecture direction and enforce engineering standards across the platform

• Build core security platform components from scratch, including service boundaries, identity systems, and deployment models

• Establish lightweight engineering processes that support fast execution without unnecessary overhead

• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance

• Remove blockers across backend, frontend, data, and DevOps

• Build PoCs and validate infrastructure and security design decisions early

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production incidents across infrastructure, networking, and application layers

• Support compliance readiness by enabling controls, logging, and evidence collection for frameworks like NIS2, DORA, ISO 27001, and SOC 2

• Collaborate closely with the CEO, CPTO, and product leadership on technical and execution decisions

• Support hiring, onboarding, and technical evaluation of new engineers

About You

You are a strong backend engineer who has naturally moved into leadership without losing your love for building. You are comfortable with ambiguity, used to working with limited structure, and energised by the idea of shaping something from the ground up.

• Senior-level software engineering background, with meaningful experience leading engineering teams while still writing code regularly
• Strong Go experience and a high bar for code quality and architecture
• Solid production experience with AWS, including Docker, Kubernetes (EKS), and containerised workloads
• Comfortable with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar), and monitoring / observability tooling such as Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and Prometheus
• Experience with coding copilots like Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar
• Familiar with supporting production SaaS platforms
• Strong communicator in English

Nice to have:

• Previous experience as a founding or early-stage engineering lead
• Background in cybersecurity, identity security, or enterprise SaaS
• Exposure to DevOps, SRE, or data engineering
• Experience with security architecture, permission models, identity graphs, or access control frameworks
• Understanding of OAuth / OIDC, API tokens, IdP, SSO, SCIM, RBAC / ABAC, and service accounts
• Familiarity with cloud identity and security controls (e.g. IAM, CloudTrail, Azure Entra ID)
• Hands‑on with SIEM platforms such as Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, or IBM QRadar
• Knowledge of Zero Trust principles, tokenisation, least privilege, and continuous verification
• Experience with AI / LLM security, agent logic, or agent sandboxing
• German language skills

Why Join

This is a founding team role with equity in a well‑funded company, direct access to the CEO and CPTO, and genuine ownership over the technical direction of the platform. You will be building something from zero in a domain that matters, identity security and AI agent governance, with the autonomy to make meaningful decisions from day one. As the team grows, so does the leadership opportunity. The role is based in central Berlin, hybrid, with regular team offsites.