Platform Engineer
Zauber • Berlin, Berlin, GermanyReferral bonus: If you know someone exceptional feel free to connect us via LinkedIn (Dennis Agidigbi), if we end up hiring them for a full-time role, you’ll receive 10,000€.
🌍 About Zauber
After co-founding and scaling Forto to over $600M in funding, I took a step back to reflect on what’s still broken in global logistics. The answer was clear: it’s still a human-first, spreadsheet-heavy industry, full of repetitive processes and broken system interoperability.
With the rise of AI agents, we now have the tools to rethink that from the ground up. Zauber builds autonomous agents for the global logistics industry, AI workers that handle operational tasks, talk to systems and humans alike, and get better every day.
🚢 We're already live with global logistics leaders in Europe and Asia
💰 Backed by one of Europe's top early-stage funds
📈 Growing fast and hiring exceptional engineers to join early
Now we are looking for an exceptional Platform Engineer to help us define and build the next generation of AI-powered logistics systems.
🪄 About the Role
You will build the infrastructure that our AI agents run on. We've made pragmatic early tooling choices for speed, and as we scale, some will hold and some won't. We need someone who understands the distributed systems principles underneath modern tooling, and can make the right call on when to keep things simple and when to reach for something heavier. This is a foundational role, and you'll design the systems the rest of the team builds on.
⚡️ Responsibilities
Build and operate the runtime infrastructure that powers our AI agents in production, the systems that customers depend on
Design for concurrency and failure, including queuing, retries, backpressure, and idempotency, so agent workflows stay reliable under real-world load
Own production reliability: latency budgets, error budgets, capacity planning, and incident response
Instrument the stack with tracing, structured logging, and alerting so problems surface before users notice them
Own the deployment pipeline end-to-end: CI/CD, preview and staging environments, and the path from local dev to production
Build internal tooling and abstractions that let the product team ship faster without worrying about infrastructure
👤 You Might Be a Fit If You...
Have experience owning infrastructure end-to-end at a startup, where you picked the tools and lived with the consequences
Understand distributed systems deeply enough to know what managed platforms are doing under the hood, and where their abstractions will break
Care about developer experience: deployment pipelines, local dev setups, error messages, and the small things that compound into engineering velocity
Prefer to automate yourself out of toil rather than accept it
Want to lay the foundation at a company where infrastructure decisions directly shape the product
🛠 What You Bring
Strong understanding of distributed systems: concurrency, eventual consistency, event-driven architectures, and failure modes. You have the mental models even if you've implemented them with modern serverless tools rather than raw AWS primitives
Experience with CI/CD design: multi-environment pipelines, automated testing gates, preview deployments, infrastructure-as-code
Hands-on experience with platforms like Vercel, and an honest sense of where they scale and where they don't
Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools like Inngest, Temporal, or Step Functions, and the queueing and retry semantics underneath them
MongoDB experience: schema design tradeoffs, indexing strategy, and performance tuning as data and query patterns evolve
Strong observability practice, ideally Datadog, including distributed tracing, custom metrics, and SLO-based alerting
Enough AWS fluency (ECS, Lambda, SQS, IAM) to know what you'd reach for when the managed tools hit their limits
High-agency mindset and comfort operating independently in a fast-changing environment
📍 Location & Logistics
Berlin Office preferred, but open for hybrid setups
Annual offsite (last year we took the team for 4 weeks to San Francisco)
Start: As soon as possible
💼 What We Offer
Top-of-market compensation and meaningful early equity
Direct access to real users and fast feedback loops
A highly experienced team with full trust and autonomy
The opportunity to shape the foundations of a company and product from day one
A mission that matters: building intelligent systems to power the future of global trade
🚀 Why Now
We’re not a demo company. We’re in production with real customers, in one of the world’s most critical and complex industries. Demand is not our bottleneck, execution is. This is your chance to join extremely early, shape the company, and build what will become the core infrastructure for global logistics automation.
We envision a world where every shipment is proactively managed by intelligent agents. Where operators have superhuman capabilities at their fingertips and trade never stalls.
🇪🇺 Building from Europe
What drives us personally is the belief that Europe’s long-term prosperity and sovereignty depend on a strong economic engine. We need more AI product-first European global champions on the world stage.
Our mission is to build one of the biggest automation companies in the world - from Europe. While our HQ will be in Europe, we will relentlessly benchmark ourselves with the best globally and sell internationally from the beginning.