Product Engineer (Backend/AI) @Briink

At Briink, we’re building AI technology for the global sustainability economy. We work with the world’s largest climate organizations, including CDP and PRI, and multinational companies such as Bayer, Siemens, Commerzbank, E.ON, and Heidelberg Materials.

Our technology helps automate how sustainability data is collected, analyzed, verified, and acted on. Through our work with global climate organizations, what you build at Briink will directly impact the sustainability workflows of more than 30,000 companies, investors, and cities worldwide.

We’re a small team working at enormous scale. Your code won’t sit behind an internal tool or an experimental demo — it will help shape how some of the world’s largest organizations understand and act on their environmental impact. Based at Berlin’s AI Campus, with a second office in London, and backed by over €7 million in funding, we want to prove that some of the world’s most powerful technology can also be a powerful force for good.

Application requirement: Intro video

As part of your application, please submit a short intro video (max 2 minutes) answering:

1. Who you are and what you have done/built that is relevant for this role.
2. Why you’re excited about owning and shipping AI-powered products at Briink.
3. Why Briink’s sustainability mission resonates with you.

Upload your video using this form (YouTube unlisted, Loom, or any other solution is fine). We do this to get a better sense of candidates before continuing the process. Any application without a video will not be considered ;) As Briink’s Backend/AI Product Engineer, you’ll join a small, high-ownership product and engineering team building AI-powered products for sustainability professionals.

This is not a narrowly scoped backend role. You’ll take meaningful product problems from initial discovery and user conversations through technical design, implementation, and iteration to deploy them at scale across the ESG market. You’ll combine strong backend and AI/LLM engineering with product judgement and the initiative to work out what should be built - not just how to action a predefined ticket.

You will:

• Own product features end to end, from understanding the user problem and defining the right approach through to delivery, measurement, and improvement.
• Design and build scalable backend systems, including APIs, data models, workflows, and infrastructure for complex enterprise products.
• Build and ship applied AI/LLM features, such as LLM chains, RAG systems, tool-using agents, structured-output pipelines, and evaluation workflows
• Create reusable, extensible platform building blocks that support multiple user journeys and reporting workflows rather than solving each problem in isolation.
• Improve the robustness of our systems, strengthening reliability, testing, observability, performance, and maintainability as we scale.
• Work directly with users, product, and data, using qualitative feedback and product data to understand the real problem and evaluate whether a solution works.
• Prototype and test new AI capabilities, turning promising ideas into practical product improvements that accelerate our roadmap.
• Bring thoughtful opinions and constructive challenge, helping the team make better product and technical decisions.
• Collaborate closely with other engineers, including through pair programming, technical design discussions, and shared problem-solving.

Technical requirements

• Strong professional backend engineering experience, with a track record of designing and shipping reliable production systems.
• Experience in a small, high-ownership product team, ideally within a startup or scale-up engineering organisation of roughly 5–20 engineers.
• Evidence that you have shipped meaningful products end to end, rather than owning only a narrow component within a much larger organisation.
• Strong experience in Python (or another modern backend language such as Java, Ruby, or TypeScript, combined with the ability and willingness to become productive in Python quickly).
• Strong API, database, and systems design skills, with the ability to model complex workflows and build maintainable foundations for enterprise products.
• Applied AI/LLM experience: you have experience or a strong interest in LLM-powered features, ideally involving RAG or retrieval, tool use, agents, structured outputs, or evaluation systems.
• A solid software-quality mindset, including testing, code review, CI/CD, observability, and pragmatic approaches to reliability and security.
• Cloud and container experience, with an understanding of how to deploy, operate, and scale production workloads.
• Fluent English (C1+), both written and spoken.

Nice to have

• Experience building workflow, reporting, questionnaire, or other complex B2B SaaS products.
• Familiarity with backend technologies such as FastAPI, PostgreSQL, background queues
• Any experience with LangChain, LangSmith, or other LLM frameworks
• Deeper experience with RAG, retrieval, agents, LLM evaluation, and production AI systems.
• Experience improving latency, cost, and reliability for AI workloads.
• Knowledge of ESG, sustainability, climate tech, or corporate reporting.
• German language skills.

Who you are

• Kind and collaborative: You treat people well, communicate clearly, and help create a supportive, low-ego team environment.
• Mission-driven: You care about using technology to accelerate sustainability and climate action.
• Sharp and curious: You learn quickly, ask good questions, and enjoy getting to the root of difficult product and technical problems.
• A product-minded builder: You think beyond the task in front of you, focus on the user’s real problem, and care about whether what you ship creates value.
• Highly self-directed: You thrive in a fast-moving environment with autonomy, ambiguity, and limited oversight.
• Pragmatic and action-oriented: You can move from ideas to experiments to production without waiting for perfect requirements.
• Opinionated but open-minded: You challenge ideas constructively, welcome pushback, and enjoy thinking through problems with others.
• Commercially aware and creative: You balance technical quality with user needs, business value, and speed.

If your experience doesn’t align precisely with all the criteria, don't worry! We encourage you to still apply. Many people miss out on opportunities because they feel they don’t fit every requirement—we believe in attitude, growth and iteration, not perfection!

• Competitive salary and equity, reflecting your impact and ownership.
• Purpose-driven mission: Build tools that help organisations act more sustainably and make the ESG data ecosystem more transparent.
• Flexible hybrid setup: Berlin or London based candidates are strongly preferred, with access to our team and the wider startup community at the Merantix AI Campus.
• Trust and autonomy: Own meaningful problems, shape the product, and influence how we build as the company grows.
• A genuinely high-impact role: Increase our delivery capacity, strengthen the robustness of our platform, and accelerate product innovation.
• Dynamic environment: Work in a small, ambitious team at the intersection of applied AI, enterprise software, and sustainability.
• Learning budget and quarterly hackathons: Explore new technologies and prototype ideas that push Briink forward.
• A thoughtful hiring process: We are focused on finding the right person, and are willing to take the time needed to do so.