Founding Platform Engineer — Staff / Lead

Context

TechVera is an early-stage company built on a sovereign LLM routing platform — every provider behind one OpenAI-compatible API, each request routed by policy (jurisdiction, cost, capability). The current thesis takes that engine into regulated industries through certified partners, with auditability and certification as market entry. Like any early-stage thesis, it will keep evolving — the platform is built so strategy can move without rebuilds, and the role is cut the same way: stable skills, moving priorities.

We are hiring the second engineer — Staff or Lead level, intentionally not narrow: in an agentic-engineering operating model, one wellsupported senior with strong agent fluency does the work of a small platform team. The product runs on a customer-data plane on OVHcloud Paris (SecNumCloud); a separate operations plane on Hetzner hosts the internal tooling and the agentic environment that builds the product.

What you'll own — today's priorities

The constant: the platform, its reliability, and its evidence-grade operation. The current cut:

• The platform. The control plane — currently a handful of Python services plus a React portal on managed Kubernetes. Architecture co-owned with the CTO now, fully owned over time.
• Certifiability as architecture — the current critical path. Tamper-evident audit trail, evidence schema co-developed with a certification partner, tenant separation in the data model, and a config-driven deployable gateway package — the seams that make multi-tenancy and onprem later an installation, not a rebuild. ISO 27001 readiness on the roadmap.
• Reliability for external users. Real traffic starts now — sponsored test users, then pilot customers from the partner's installed base: SLOs, incident response, change discipline. You make the platform boring.
• Input-driven evolution. What gets built next comes from market evidence; minimal builds behind per-tenant switches, then generalized. No features on stock.
• Operations plane and the agentic operating model. AI agents are first-class platform users with their own identity, RBAC and audit surface — you shape that operating model.

What we look for

• Staff or Lead — 8–12 years production platform / SRE / DevOps, ideally with one founding or early-stage stint carrying platform end-to-end without a team.
• Shipped SaaS at startup tempo; peer-level in architecture conversations with the CTO and in security reviews with enterprise procurement — soon also with certification auditors.
• Has driven AI-mediated engineering in production: reads agent diffs faster than writing them, knows when an agent is wrong before the tests do.
• Treats re-prioritization as normal operating mode: early-stage direction changes are a feature of this job, not a disruption of it.
• Deep enough in today's surfaces to steer and judge agent output. Held lightly: we hire for systems judgment — correctness, operability, evidence — not for loyalty to a stack.

Today's stack — a snapshot, not a promise

How we build comes first: the codebase is developed agentically, hands-off — it is no longer human-maintained line by line. Humans direct, review and set the evidence gates (journeys, tests, audits); agents write and rewrite the implementation underneath.

Customer-data plane: Python/FastAPI services · React/TypeScript portal · PostgreSQL (CloudNativePG) · Kubernetes, GitOps via ArgoCD + Helm across dev/staging/prod · Keycloak (OIDC) · OpenTelemetry · OpenBao · Terraform. Operations plane: an ArgoCD-run Kubernetes hub — Forgejo (Git + CI), Harbor registry, Keycloak SSO, OpenBao, SigNoz + central Grafana, NetBird mesh, Stalwart mail, and the internal tool suite.

Working with us

• 3 days per week on-site — Vienna or Wels office, your choice; rest remote. Within commuting reach of one of the two.
• English for all persistent artifacts; German welcome for customer-facing work.

Interested?

Contact Wolfgang Lubowski via LinkedIn or send a mail to [email protected].

The applicable collective agreement is the Austrian IT-Kollektivvertrag (IT-KV); the collective-agreement minimum salary for this role is €5.444 gross per month (14 payments/year; classification ST2, Erfahrungsstufe) — with clear willingness to overpay depending on qualification and experience.