Founding Engineer (Cortena)

👋 About Cortena

Cortena is building the next generation of AI-powered financial intelligence for SMEs. Finance teams today are overwhelmed by scattered data, fragile spreadsheets, and delayed insights. We’re changing that.

Based in Rotterdam and backed by Builders Studio, Cortena is on a mission to give finance leaders clarity, foresight, and control — turning messy financial data into real-time cash visibility, forecasting, and scenario planning. We combine modern AI, automation, and financial reasoning models to help companies make faster, smarter decisions.

As we enter a pivotal product-market fit phase with growing traction, we seek our Founding Engineer – an AI-driven builder – to pioneer the core intelligence and platform that will define how SMEs manage their financial future.

Why this role exists

As our Founding Engineer, you’ll be a cornerstone of Cortena’s product and technical DNA, working closely with our CTO.

Your mission: architect and implement our AI-driven financial core, ensuring this intelligence flows into a seamless, intuitive product that finance leaders love. This is about building new financial reasoning systems with LLMs, agents and sophisticated forecasting algorithms — shaping a system that learns, adapts, and guides decision-making.

This role is for a versatile, hands-on builder who thrives at the intersection of AI, financial data, and product design, and is motivated to solve one of the most challenging and impactful problems in business: giving SMEs real-time clarity over their financials.

What You'll Pioneer & Build

• Research, design, and implement novel AI approaches for financial intelligence.

• Build and refine AI-native financial models.

• Architect and deliver high-quality, full-stack components (from financial data pipelines to pixel-perfect UI) that bring financial intelligence to life.

• Design scalable and secure data integrations and transformations with accounting systems (Xero, Exact, QuickBook, etc.) and adjacent tools (CRM, HRIS).

• Develop robust data pipelines & MLOps for ingesting, cleaning, and reasoning over financial data.

• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of AI features: from PoC to production, benchmarking, and continuous optimization.

• Ensure a delightful user journey: turning complexity (multi-source financial data) into clear, actionable insights.

• Provide critical engineering input into product strategy and UX — ensuring the tech solves real finance team challenges.

• Co-define Cortena’s AI & data roadmap with the CTO, aligning tech possibilities with business strategy.

What we're looking for

• Core passion & mindset: Deep AI passion with a commitment to building exceptional, user-centric products; a product-minded engineer who champions great UX.

• Full-stack AI expertise: 5+ years of versatile software engineering (front-end, back-end, infrastructure) with a track record of deploying and optimizing production-grade ML/AI systems.

• Technical proficiency: Strong skills in our core stack (React, TypeScript, Next.js) — or the ability to rapidly master new technologies.

• Advanced AI skills: Hands-on experience with LLMs, reliable Feature Extraction, RAG, and vector databases (fine-tuning, embeddings, prompt engineering), plus a solid grasp of core ML principles.

• Cloud & scalability: Proven ability to design and scale open-source based cloud-native apps and AI pipelines (Kubernetes, Nats, Mongo, Gitlab) with solid CI/CD practices. Ansible + Rancher experience for our self-hosted Kubernetes cluster is a plus.

• Financial data modeling: Experience working with structured financial datasets, applying ML/AI for forecasting and scenario planning.

• Experience building financial tools: Background in building or integrating with double-entry-bookkeeping, finance, accounting, or ERP systems or other mission-critical platforms.

• Security & Privacy: Experience with data security & privacy, knowledge of applying common security practices and experience with compliance frameworks like ISO 27001 or SOC2 in a fast-going startup environment is a plus.

• Curiosity & adaptability: Thrives in early-stage chaos, experiments boldly, and learns quickly to find the best solutions. KISS + DRY is part of your life-style.

Why Cortena?

• Redefine financial intelligence: Shape the intelligence behind a platform that gives SMEs real financial clarity.

• High-impact founding role: Influence technical direction, AI strategy, and company culture from day one.

• Significant equity upside: Substantial equity for foundational members who want long-term wealth creation and shared success.

• Competitive salary & benefits: While equity is central, we provide a solid package to support you.

• Deep technical challenges: Work on building an AI-native financial reasoning model.

• Build something meaningful: Help thousands of entrepreneurs and finance teams make better decisions, faster.

This role is for Cortena, a Builders portfolio company. Hiring is managed by the Cortena team.