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South Africa - Gauteng (ZipRecruiter)
Remote only
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You will join a company building the digital infrastructure for grant funding, helping organizations spend less time navigating funding logic, forms, and administration and more time on the projects and impact that matter.
The platform brings together research across 18,000+ funding programmes, AI-supported analysis and application drafting, expert review, and ongoing grant management. AI handles what can scale, while people bring experience and judgement where it matters.
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will work end-to-end on AntragPlus, contributing across the backend, frontend, infrastructure, and AI pipeline at the core of the platform.
You will be one of the company's first engineering hires, with significant ownership over technical decisions, engineering standards, architecture, and the product itself. You will own problems from the initial conversation with the grant team through to production, rather than simply working from predefined tickets.
Seeking a highly autonomous Senior Software Engineer with strong full-stack experience who can build and ship product features end-to-end while contributing deeply to AI pipelines, infrastructure, production systems, and technical architecture.
The ideal candidate combines strong technical depth with a high-ownership mindset, a usability-first approach, and the ability to identify and solve problems independently in an environment where not everything is fully defined yet.
Build and ship end-to-end product features independently, including the user interface.
Work confidently across the frontend, backend, infrastructure, and AI pipeline.
Build from real user problems by working closely with the grant team, rather than simply implementing predefined tickets.
Develop interfaces with a usability-first mindset, ensuring the product genuinely works for grant writers.
Take ownership of problems from initial discovery through to production deployment.
Contribute to reducing the time from starting a new project to a finished, submitted application through product improvements, automation, and better workflows.
Advance the platform's AI capabilities through prompt engineering, context management, cost control, and multi-provider AI setups.
Work with AI providers including AWS Bedrock, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
Build and operate AI pipelines in production, going beyond simply calling an API.
Develop and own the company's AI evaluation practice, including prompt quality, model selection, and regression detection.
Work with AI agents and tool-calling workflows where applicable.
Use AI-native development tools such as Claude Code or Cursor as part of your engineering workflow.
Operate, monitor, and debug the live production environment.
Work with tools including Sentry, CloudWatch, and Postgres performance monitoring.
Contribute to infrastructure running on AWS, including ECS and RDS.
Maintain and improve production reliability and performance.
Identify and resolve technical issues with a strong debugging instinct in live systems.
Shape the company's technical architecture, code quality, engineering standards, and technical roadmap.
Help establish how the engineering team works and the technical standards it follows.
Identify better technical solutions proactively rather than waiting for predefined tasks.
Take complete ownership of technical problems and drive them through to resolution.
Contribute to building scalable technical foundations as one of the company's first engineering hires.
Several years of professional experience with TypeScript and Node.js.
Strong depth in Postgres, including JSONB, query performance, and migrations.
Strong full-stack capabilities, with experience across:
Next.js 15 / React Query
Express / BullMQ
AWS (ECS, RDS)
Terraform
Hands-on experience building and operating AI pipelines in production, beyond simply integrating an AI API.
Experience working with LLMs and AI-powered applications.
Strong understanding of prompt engineering, context management, model selection, and AI evaluation.
Strong debugging skills in live production systems.
High level of autonomy and ownership, with the ability to identify problems, develop solutions, and close the loop without hand-holding.
Usability-first mindset, with the ability to build interfaces that genuinely work for end users.
Comfortable working in an environment where not everything is fully defined and where engineers are expected to proactively shape solutions.
AI-native approach to software development, with familiarity using tools such as Claude Code or Cursor.
German language skills at B1 level or above. The customers and product are German-speaking, while the team works bilingually.
Experience with AI agents and tool-calling workflows in production.
Fully remote work is possible.
Competitive compensation and participation in company success.
Real ownership as one of the company's first engineering hires, with the opportunity to shape the product, technology, and engineering standards.
€2,000 annual professional development budget.
Opportunity to work on a scalable SaaS product with clear market demand and genuine social impact.
Short decision paths and direct collaboration with the leadership team.
Access to exclusive funding databases and modern tools.
Team events and optional workations.
Customer First · Complete Ownership · Ship, Learn, Repeat · One Team