Founding Principal Engineer

Vor 4 Tagen

Berlin, Deutschland Python Software Foundation Vollzeit 120.000 € - 180.000 € Vertrag

You own the platform behind our medical device: backend services, data, infrastructure, security and identity. A first version runs today. The work is to make it trustworthy enough for clinical use: patient data that stays safe, an audit trail that holds up for years, and a system that recovers when something breaks. You work closely with the founders and our CTO.

How Python is used: the backend, the analysis that turns detections into a result, and our infrastructure scripts are Python. You write mostly Python, plus PostgreSQL and OpenTofu.

What you'll do:

  • Own the platform end to end: backend, data, infrastructure and security.
  • Get it ready for clinical use, and keep it reliable as we grow.
  • Build identity, access and data handling that clinics and auditors can trust.
  • Make the architecture calls: what to build now, what to defer, what to cut.
  • Set the engineering standard and help hire the team that follows.

What we offer: a founding role with a virtual share option plan (VSOP), a competitive salary (we share the range in our first conversation), and flexible hours. We work from Berlin and meet in person regularly, up to several days a week. English is our working language; German isn't required. We sponsor the EU Blue Card.

Restrictions

  • No telecommuting
  • No Agencies Please

Requirements

  • You've built backend platforms from scratch and run them in production, through outages, data incidents, migrations and growth.
  • Database depth: indexing, locking, transactions, replication, zero-downtime schema changes, and backups you've actually restored.
  • Security by default: authentication and authorisation, tenant isolation, secrets, audit logging.
  • Identity: identity providers, sessions and tokens, roles and permissions, onboarding and offboarding.
  • Infrastructure as code, containers, Linux, networking and cloud are everyday tools for you.
  • Coding agents are part of your daily work, and you stand behind every line you ship.

Nice to have: regulated environments with audits (medical devices, health, finance), and serving ML models in production.

About the Company

Ferto turns an iPhone on a standard microscope into a lab instrument. Computer vision models locate, track and measure cells in real time, starting with semen analysis. We're a small, well-funded founding team in Berlin, founded in 2026, and we build a medical device together with clinicians and lab staff.