Senior Backend Engineer (Berlin)

GeneralMind is a Berlin-based AI startup building an autonomous AI-powered supply chain automation platform. Backed by Lakestar Leo Capital and leading angels with $12M raised in January 2026 were eliminating manual inbox-driven workflows in enterprise supply-chain operations - automating Sales Order processing Purchase Order lifecycle management Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable. We integrate with SAP Oracle Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce serving companies like a $16B food retailer and an $8.2B resources company.

Backend Ownership

• Own the backend end-to-end: service architecture API design reliability posture and long-term technical direction.
• Be the person who knows how everything fits together - and who other engineers come to when theyre not sure where something belongs.
• Set the bar on code quality service boundaries and shared abstractions across the engineering team.
• Make foundational decisions with conviction document the reasoning and evolve them as the system grows.

Python Services & Production Systems

• Design for failure: retries timeouts graceful degradation and recovery paths built in from the start.
• Write code that is easy to operate - observable testable and straightforward to debug at 2am.
• Understand the runtime not just the framework. Know when the problem is the code the config or the infrastructure.

Workflow Engineering & Temporal

• Design and build durable workflows using Temporal - long-running processes async coordination saga patterns.
• Own workflow observability: know when a workflow is stuck degraded or silently wrong before a customer notices.
• Think carefully about idempotency failure modes and replay semantics not just the happy path.
• Evolve workflows without breaking running instances; manage versioning with intention.

Reliability & Systems Thinking

• Detect regressions before they become incidents; build the tooling to catch them early.
• Own the operational posture of the services you build: alerting runbooks on-call readiness.
• Identify structural debt before it compounds; propose refactors that are thoughtful not just correct.

• Experience: 6 years building and operating backend systems in Python with clear ownership of production services - not just feature delivery.
• Python depth: Non-negotiable. You make deliberate choices about async vs. sync framework selection and performance tradeoffs. You know the language well enough to have opinions.
• Temporal or equivalent: Youve used Temporal (or a comparable workflow engine) in production. You understand durable execution not just task queues.
• Reliability instinct: Idempotency retries and observability are part of how you design not afterthoughts.
• End-to-end ownership: Youre comfortable being the person who holds the full backend picture. You identify whats broken or missing before youre asked and you dont leave the system worse than you found it.
• A real spike: Were a strong team with broad coverage. What were hiring for is someone who brings a 10x improvement in an area were currently underinvested in. That might be workflow systems data infrastructure AI-native backend patterns or deep domain expertise. We dont know exactly what shape it takes - but you should know what yours is and be able to articulate why it matters.