Founding Software Engineer

About Cerve

At Cerve, our mission is to build the data foundation the €10 trillion food and beverage supply chain has been missing. We operate the supply chain intelligence infrastructure for F&B. With this foundation in place, the industry gains the visibility, automation and shared insight needed to expand margins, tackle waste, food security and food borne illness at scale.

About the role

As founding Software Engineer at Cerve, you will play a pivotal role in designing, developing, maintaining and securing our infrastructure and products to drive connectivity in the food industry.

In collaboration with the Engineering and Product team, you will design and build our core infrastructure, distributed platform and API products. This role involves coding, setting development standards, and ensuring solutions are reliable, performant, scalable and secured.

What you’ll do:

As our Software Engineer, you will be collaborating with the engineering and product teams. You will have a significant impact on our infrastructure and products, designing and delivering performant and scalable solutions while maintaining high coding standards:

• System Design & Development: Design, develop and maintain scalable and high-performance distribution systems in production.

• Hands-on Coding & Architecture: Take an active role in coding and architectural decisions, ensuring high technical standards and driving the success of a high-performing development team.

• Backend Services & Integrations: Build and maintain backend services with a focus on performance, reliability, security, and scalability, ensuring smooth integration with other systems.

• Cross-functional Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, engineers, and other key stakeholders to define, design, and deliver new features that align with both product and customer needs.

• Code Quality & Best Practices: Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code while adhering to best practices and contributing to a high-quality codebase.

• Observability & Monitoring: Develop and implement observability and monitoring solutions to ensure exceptional reliability and quality across products and integrations.

You are:

• Entrepreneurial: Thriving in a fast-paced startup environment. You're proactive, self-motivated, and have a can-do attitude that gets projects done.

• Systemic Thinker: You can see the bigger picture while keeping an eye on the details, ensuring every element works in harmony.

• Autonomous: You are comfortable in small teams where you are expected to take full ownership of your projects, driving them from concept to completion.

• Collaborative: You’re eager to grow alongside us, learning from both success and setbacks as we build the platform together.

• Thirst for Knowledge: You’re passionate about your craft, always seeking new knowledge while sharing your best practices with the team.

• Thriving in Ambiguity: Uncertainty motivates you. You embrace complex challenges that often raise more questions than answers.

You have:

• At least 6 years of production-level experience in owning, building, delivering, and maintaining large distributed systems at scale with API-led companies.

• Strong programming skills in Go and Python.

• Working experience with infrastructures and cloud providers such as GCP and AWS.

• Full proficiency building and managing databases in PostgresSQL, NoSQL and Analytical Databases.

• Deep understanding of multi-threading, concurrency and parallel processing technologies.

• A thorough understanding of engineering best practices from appropriate testing paradigms to effective peer code reviews.

• Experience using AI assisted coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, etc.)

• [+] Experience building agentic platforms

We Offer:

• Salary: Competitive

• Discretionary Bonus: Potential of company wide annual payment

• Flexible Vacation: 25 days, Bank holidays and Special days

• Flexible hours: Choose your working hours around core hours (9:30 – 16:30)

• Stock Option: Become an owner of Cerve with significant wealth creation potential

• Pension: Auto-enrolment into our pension scheme

• Hybrid Workspace: Hybrid working from our R&D Hub in Gothenburg

• Best Tech and Equipment: Macbook and the best equipment you need to excel

• Relocation: Potential relocation package for the right candidate in this role.

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcome and valued. We believe that diversity of thought and experience is essential to our success, and we are particularly interested in candidates who can bring a different perspective to our team, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or career status.