Founding Engineer | Backend & Data Infrastructure

Sea Sentinel AI · Munich · Full-Time

What we do

Sea Sentinel AI is a risk intelligence platform built specifically for the maritime container shipping industry. We monitor ports, vessels, and shipping routes worldwide, detecting disruptions before anyone else does.

When a vessel crashes, we detect it from a local newspaper hours or days before major media picks it up. When a typhoon is still days away from hitting a port, we warn customers before the chaos starts. This way, we enable our customers to be ahead of crises, rather than simply reacting to them last-minute.

We sell our intelligence via an API, which means our customers integrate directly into their own systems and workflows. No complex frontend to build or maintain — the data does the work.

We're a lean team of maritime experts and engineers that fully embraces the great opportunities of LLMs, and we punch well above our weight. Every line of code you ship has real consequences for real supply chains.

The role

We're looking for a backend engineer to join us as a full-time team member. This is a broad role with a clear center of gravity: keeping our data pipeline healthy and building the infrastructure for what comes next.

Concretely, that means:

• Owning our news and data pipeline (data upstream). At the core of what we do is a pipeline that ingests raw data from across the globe and transforms it into published maritime incidents at scale. The core infrastructure is built. Your job is to keep it healthy and make it more robust: scrapers break, proxies fail, crawlers get blocked, and somewhere in the chain a signal gets lost. You'll figure out where and fix it.
• Turning noise into signal (data downstream). Ingesting data is only half the job — most of it is noise. The harder problem is finding the genuine maritime incident buried in thousands of unrelated articles, deduplicating it, extracting what matters, and surfacing it before anyone else. You'll own the systems that separate signal from noise.
• Expanding into new data verticals. When we move into new areas, you'll help figure out how to approach them: researching the landscape, benchmarking data providers, assessing data quality, and making the case for what to integrate. You'll work with both structured and unstructured data and form your own views. This is where the role bleeds into product thinking — not in a process-heavy way, but in caring about whether what you're building actually solves the right problem.
• Working across the stack when needed. We have an internal frontend that's deliberately kept simple — it's a tool for our team, not a product. You'll own it, but we're not looking for a React expert or a designer. Common sense about what makes internal tooling actually useful is enough.

You won't have a backlog handed to you on Monday morning. You'll be expected to understand the system well enough to know what the most important problems are and go solve them.

What we're looking for

Must-haves:

• You've run something in production and dealt with it breaking — you know what silent failure looks like and how to find it, using sensible monitoring and alerting
• Experience with web scraping and data pipelines: proxies, crawlers, anti-bot detection, fragile HTML, the unglamorous stuff that keeps intelligence platforms alive
• Good coding standards and the judgment to know when to apply them and when to move fast
• High self-direction — you identify problems, you prioritize, you drive to resolution without needing someone to tell you what's important
• Analytical curiosity — comfortable sitting with ambiguous questions, forming hypotheses, and making a case for your conclusions

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with TypeScript
• AWS experience: Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB, CloudWatch
• Familiarity with SST or Pulumi (we use SST)
• Experience structuring or maintaining APIs
• Prior work in logistics, shipping, or any data-intensive domain

We don't expect you to arrive knowing everything. We do expect you to arrive with strong fundamentals, good instincts, and the drive to figure out what you don't yet know.

We care more about the right person than the right CV. A sharp, motivated junior and a seasoned engineer can both be the right fit for this role — what we're looking for is curiosity, ownership, and the ability to operate with minimal hand-holding. Compensation reflects experience.

What we offer

Full ownership from day one. You'll work directly with the founders. When you make a decision, it ships. You'll be a core part of how we expand into new areas, from the research phase through to production.

We go where the opportunity actually is. We have strong revenue and we're growing in the areas where we know we can win. We don't chase trends or move into spaces because someone else thinks we should. The roadmap is driven by what our customers need and what the data tells us.

A domain worth caring about. Our customers reroute shipments around typhoons, prevent factory shutdowns, and pull cargo out of war zones because we gave them the intelligence to act in time. The work you do will have consequences you can actually trace.

A founder who's done this before. One of our co-founders has previously scaled and exited a company. You'll be working closely with someone who knows what building something real actually looks like.

Great people deserve great conditions. Top-of-the-line MacBooks and screens, a proper office in Munich, Wellpass sports membership, competitive market-rate salary and VSOPs.

The kind of person who will thrive here

You've maintained something that breaks in production and you know what that actually feels like. You've built things without a detailed spec. You're comfortable sitting with an ambiguous problem, forming a hypothesis, and figuring out the answer before anyone tells you what to build. You're more energized by owning a problem end-to-end than by getting a ticket assigned. You'd rather work in a small team where your work is visible than disappear into a large org where it isn't.

You're probably not looking for your first job, and you want to build.

How to apply

Send a short email to careers@sea-sentinel.ai with:

1. A few sentences on what drew you to this role specifically
2. An example of a system you've maintained or built that you're proud of — what broke, what you learned, what you'd do differently
3. Your CV

Sea Sentinel AI is based in Munich, Germany. We work hybrid — we value in-person time but we're flexible on the split.