Head of Engineering

About the job

tl;dr

• After 14 years in construction tech, Lea & Jonas are building the AI foundation for the construction industry
• 6 of the 20 largest construction companies in the German-speaking region already rely on Kuro every day, representing over €40bn in combined annual construction volume
• Construction has some of the most complex, unstructured data you can throw at an LLM. At Kuro, you can tackle some of the hardest problems in applied AI every day
• Curious about the bigger engineering challenge? Explore the vision and open problems at kuro.build

About us

Lea and Jonas scaled two of Europe's leading construction tech companies - Capmo and alcemy - and saw firsthand the challenges holding the industry back. Now they're tackling the root cause: the 50% of construction work still lost to manual data handling.

Kuro is building the AI foundation for construction. We're reimagining how construction professionals get work done and make decisions by leveraging AI to augment back-office workflows and make core data accessible. We are not pursuing marginal improvements, but a step change for construction.

After one year on the market, leading construction enterprises with a combined annual construction volume of >€40 billion use Kuro every day to automate workflows and make faster, better decisions. Backed by an €10 million seed round, we already process more than 1 million pages every month and expect that volume to grow 10x over the next six months.

We are 15 people based in Berlin. You will join a group of technical ex-founders and builders who are ambitious and kind.

Learn more: Join Kuro - Berlin

The Opportunity

As Head of Engineering, you'll work directly with Kuro’s founders on shaping and scaling the company’s technical foundation from the ground up. This is a player-coach role with a strong hands-on focus — at least initially — at the intersection of engineering, AI, infrastructure, and product strategy. You will own Kuro’s technical direction end-to-end, including infrastructure, architecture, AI systems, and engineering culture, while helping build and mentor a high-performing engineering team.

This role is ideal for someone who wants to build exceptional technology in an early-stage environment and have real influence on how the company evolves. You’ll shape how Kuro builds — technically and culturally — while staying close to the product, the code, and the most important strategic decisions.

What You'll do

Lead Technical Execution and Direction

• Own the engineering roadmap: infrastructure choices, architecture evolution, code quality standards, and team processes
• Make the right calls at the intersection of speed and quality — you have the scar tissue to know when to move fast and when to slow down
• Drive the technical vision for Kuro's core platform: data lineage, artifact abstractions, document processing at scale, 3D model integration

Build and Innovate on Core Product

• Architect and implement complex platform capabilities: AI evaluation pipelines, scalable document ingestion, semantic search, module abstractions for forward-deployed motion
• Work hands-on with the team — this is not a pure management role
• Make foundational decisions on the AI and full-stack side of the tech stack

Build and Develop the Team

• Hire, mentor, and develop a small, senior engineering team (currently 5 engineers)
• Create a high-feedback, low-ego culture where engineers take ownership and grow
• Define hiring standards and engineering practices that scale with the company

Participate in Strategic Direction

• Work directly with the founders on product-engineering strategy
• Represent the engineering perspective in investor conversations and customer interactions when relevant

Past and current projects you would have been involved in

• Designed the core artifact abstraction layer for Kuro's document processing platform
• Architected a distributed, scalable document ingestion pipeline handling 300–3,000 files per project (PDFs, drawings, scans)
• Built and evaluated AI pipelines for automatic building component identification
• Led the migration from Railway to AWS — infrastructure, RDS, S3, deployment
• Defined engineering team rituals: async-first planning, weekly shippable outcomes, domain ownership
• Integrated enterprise customer systems (ERP, procurement tools) into Kuro's platform

Current Tech Stack

We are pragmatic and move quickly. You will have significant influence over where this stack goes.

• Web App: TypeScript
• Backend: Fastify API (TS) + Python for ML services
• Database / Storage: Supabase (Postgres) / Turbopuffer / AWS S3 (centralizing to RDS + pgvector)
• Hosting: Railway → AWS (migration in progress)
• AI: Azure / OpenAI, Gemini, Cohere

Observability, Evals & Tracking: Langfuse, Datadog

Your profile

Technical Track Record

• ~10 years of B2B SaaS fullstack development experience, including enterprise contexts
• Have scaled systems and navigated multiple infrastructure iterations — you know what breaks at scale because you've seen it
• Fluent in modern web application stacks; some affinity to data pipelines and AI/data science
• Deep familiarity with the tradeoffs between premature optimization and technical debt — you've made the wrong call before and learned from it

Leadership Experience

• Significant leadership experience — you've managed at least one engineering team
• Ideally: been part of scaling a B2B SaaS company from 0 to 10
• Ex-founder or entrepreneurial background is a strong plus

Who you are

• You saw engineering excellence first-hand at a Tier A or B startup or scaleup — you know what great looks like
• You are in love with the startup phase; not interested in corporate comfort
• You care about solving problems and having impact, not about having opinions about programming languages
• You are still hungry and driven — not coasting
• You handle the balance between pragmatism and doing it right extremely well
• You are a great communicator and a pragmatic leader

Logistics

• Fluent in English (written and spoken)
• Based in Berlin or willing to relocate
• Full-time, onsite in Berlin Mitte

Why Kuro

You are joining Kuro at the moment it matters most. The product is live, customers are paying but their journey with Kuro is only beginning and you can shape it from the get-go.

This is your chance to join extremely early and help build one of Kuro core functions but also build an extremely rare profile on how to guide enterprise users through this platform shift. There is no playbook, the world is changing at an unprecedented speed and you can shape how one of the most critical industries around the globe wins in this new era.

The process

• Intro Call — Intro, logistics & mutual fit (30 min)
• Impact Interview & Product Demo — We show you what we're building; you walk us through your highest-impact technical work with Jonas (45–60 min)
• Take-home Challenge — A hands-on coding challenge that reflects real problems we solve (4-5 hours)
• On-site Half-Day in Berlin
• Technical Deep-Dive — Code review of your submission + architecture extension session with Jonas & a senior engineer (2:00 hours)
• Leadership & Strategy — Team-building philosophy, scaling decisions & strategic alignment with Lea & Jonas (1:30 min)
• Team & Culture — Meet 2–3 engineers from the team (45 min)
• Reference Checks
• Call with our Investors
• Offer