Staff Engineer

Job description

Do you love untangling messy systems, shipping real improvements, and setting a higher engineering bar? Join meinUnterricht, Germany's leading platform for teachers, as a Staff Engineer.

You'll own the architecture of the core systems that run our business and decide how a decade of accumulated complexity gets simplified. We want a hands-on architect who questions the status quo and pushes our AI-first engineering even further. Our Tech Stack

We believe in transparency. You will be working across both legacy and modern systems, with a strong mandate to help us consolidate and modernize over time.

Where we are going (the new stack): Monorepo architecture, APIs built with Hono, Prisma for DB migrations, Vitest, PostgreSQL, Stripe, and AWS CDK for infrastructure.

What we currently have: React, Redux, Node.js (Hapi), MongoDB (Mongoose), MySQL, Zuora, and AWS (EC2, ECS, CloudFront).#### What you'll do

• Drive System Architecture: Lead the technical direction for our core systems, including subscription infrastructure, cloud foundations, shared backend services, database architecture, and data pipelines.
• Modernize the Foundation: Identify what should be kept, replaced, merged, or removed across our legacy systems, and turn that into a pragmatic target architecture with an execution path.
• Technical Ownership: You stay deep in the code on the highest-impact problems. You make the architecture decisions and the hard technical tradeoffs, and you set the bar others build to.
• Raise the Bar with AI: Model an AI-first engineering culture by using tools like Claude Code, Codex, or similar across coding, migrations, infrastructure, and workflow automation.

You come with

• Broad Systems Depth: Strong backend (fluency in TypeScript/Node.js) and infrastructure experience across areas like databases, cloud services, queues, caching, networking, integrations, or pipelines. Not just one narrow specialty.
• Migration Experience: You have led or played a major role in moving production systems from old to new, and you understand the messy middle: dual-running, rollout strategy, data integrity, and rollback planning.
• Product Sense: You think beyond the system to the user and the business. You balance long-term architecture against the value that needs to ship now.
• Cloud & Platform Experience: You're comfortable working in AWS-heavy environments and have practical experience improving infrastructure, reliability, and developer workflows. IaC experience is a big plus.
• AI-Native Mindset: You actively use AI tools in real engineering work and see them as a serious force multiplier, not a gimmick.

Why us?

• Meaningful Product: Build infrastructure behind a platform that helps tens of thousands of teachers prepare better lessons, faster.
• Real Ownership: You'll own a critical systems domain with direct impact on revenue, product velocity, and the technical future of the company.
• AI-First Engineering Culture: We invest heavily in AI tooling (Claude Max Plan or equal) and expect engineers to use it deeply and practically in day-to-day work.
• Strong Berlin Setup: Work from our office at Potsdamer Platz with a hybrid setup that supports both focused execution and in-person collaboration.
• Meaningful Benefits: A device of your choice, Deutschland Ticket or Urban Sports Club, work remotely from anywhere in the world for up to 10 days per year, Jobrad, and more.

Process

• Remote coding challenge
• Technical interview (video call)
• System design interview (preferably on site in our offices in Berlin)
• Technical leadership interview (preferably on site in our offices in Berlin)

About us

At meinUnterricht - the leading digital platform for teachers - we support teachers every day in their lesson planning.

meinUnterricht GmbH is a subsidiary of the Klett Group. We offer digital education solutions for teachers and schools. Our web-base