Founding Engineer (Cortena)

👋 About Cortena

Cortena is building the next generation of AI-native financial intelligence for SMEs. Finance teams today are overwhelmed by fragmented workflows, manual operations, and disconnected tools that never deliver a complete picture.

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 - not by adding more tools, but by connecting finance workflows into a single coherent system. We combine modern AI, automation, and agentic financial reasoning to help companies make faster, smarter, and more confident decisions.

Cortena’s belief is simple: real financial intelligence only emerges when finance workflows stop living in silos. Cortena brings these workflows together into a single, connected platform where autonomous finance agents can run operations on clean, structured, and contextualised data. As these workflows converge, financial intelligence becomes something different - not a tool, but a natural output of an integrated, autonomous finance system.

As we enter a pivotal product-market fit phase with growing traction, we seek our Founding Engineer - a systems thinker and AI-driven builder - to pioneer the workflow connectivity, agentic automation, and intelligence layer that will define how modern companies run their finance function.

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 workflows: 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.