Staff Backend Engineer
Zeit AI (YC S24)
Staff Backend Engineer
Zeit AI (YC S24)
Autonomous data engineer for European mid-market
Opportunity
ZeitMind is an autonomous data engineer for mid-market businesses. Agents and people work the same company data: ingest, pipeline, clean, analyse, build operational apps
we are growing fast and will be onboarding multiple enterprise customers a week. The backend isn't ready yet, your impact will decide the speed at which we can grow
load growth is compounding: more customers, multiple users per customer, many agent interactions per user and multiple agent artifacts (data pipelines, schedules, analyses) coming out of the interactions
you own the platform
What you'll do
scale a multi-tenant Postgres under unpredictable load: query and I/O optimisation, read/write separation, horizontal scaling
make agent-driven workloads survivable: one user can spin up 30 table syncs, some running hours, while others query large sources
manage the sandbox layer: Docker containers where agents run queries and reverse-engineer files, with compute and memory budgets
own connectivity into customer networks: SOCKS5 over WebSockets, authentication, routing
scope the architecture and build it
What we're looking for
staff or principal level, still hands-on, writing production code
built and scaled multi-tenant data platforms in a B2B startup or platform company before
deep Postgres or database knowledge: query plans, locking, I/O, caching, replication, sharding
understands startup pace and ownership without specs
pragmatic over ideal, wants to build foundations right without overengineering
strong TypeScript
English C1, German a plus
Nice to have
experience at a data platform or warehouse company (Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudflare or similar)
networking depth: proxies, VPN, routing
Location
preferred: Munich, on-site. We support relocation within Europe
already in London? We can make that work. We have people here and are opening a small office, and we'd expect regular Munich travel. In-person culture is important to us
Tech stack
TypeScript end to end. Bun, tRPC, Postgres, Supabase. React frontend (Mantine, TanStack Query). Docker, job/process management, VPN/routing, agentic frameworks
Autonomous data engineer for European mid-market
Zeit AI builds an autonomous data engineer for the European mid-market. Its product, ZeitMind, connects ERP, CRM and 600+ other source systems and uses an AI agent to deliver analytics-ready applications that remain traceable to individual transactions, running in German data centres so customer data stays in Europe. Customers describe their needs in natural language and the agent returns automation, analysis or applications without requiring dedicated internal IT capacity. Zeit AI differentiates itself by focusing on European data sovereignty (data stays in German data centres), deep integration with many source systems, and a no-IT-ops-needed experience for business users, backed by a pedigree from Palantir alumni and a European growth focus (Munich, with London expansion planned). The company aims to help European mid-market companies automate data engineering tasks, produce compliant analytics, and scale analytics apps across organizations while keeping data local to Europe.
Explore more opportunities at Zeit AI (YC S24)