The Role

You're a super IC in a small, elite engineering team. You work on core banking systems and own projects end to end. You take on big projects, drive them yourself, and deliver.

You work with engineering, product, and clients. You turn complex financial problems into clean code. You're trusted with the big calls from day 1; system design, technical tradeoffs, what we build and what we don't. The team is small on purpose, that means you have a lot of ownership, you move fast, and you make decisions that actually matter.

You're part of the product engineering team building the Programmable Bank - a bank for the new age of money movement, built around Digital Assets and AI. Your team builds the banking core across bare metal central bank infrastructure and blockchain infrastructure. We're building a Swiss clock: your job is precision engineering, translating a complex system into simple, clean code that runs reliably at scale.

Your First Six Months

Understand the codebase and increase your ownership rapidly.

Months 1-2: You ramp up fast. Understand the codebase, the domain, the product and ship meaningful code in your first weeks. Pick up a major project as an IC and start driving it. You're pairing with the team but operating independently early.
Months 3-4: You've shipped your first big project end to end. You know the domain well enough to push back on product decisions when something doesn't make sense. You're starting to influence technical direction - how we model data, how we handle edge cases, where we take shortcuts and where we don't.
Months 5-6: You're one of the people the team relies on for the hardest problems. You scope and drive projects autonomously. You have strong opinions on how the core banking systems should evolve and you're acting on them. Junior engineers come to you because your code is clean and your thinking is clear.

Who Will Thrive At Augustus

We believe that throwing smart people with high agency at big problems produces the best outcomes. The people who succeed here share the following traits:

Relentless: You can't leave something broken. You don't stop because it got hard or because no one is watching.
Set The Bar: You're harder on yourself than anyone else would be. You don't need external accountability to care about quality.
Shape The Game: You don't wait for a playbook and you don't need one. You walk into genuinely new territory and figure it out. You move before anyone asked you to.
Systems First: You don't solve problems by adding people or effort. You build systems that make the problem smaller. Your first instinct is to automate, not to handle it manually.

This role is for you if:

Your former teammates would put you in the top 5% of engineers they've worked with - your code is clean, correct, and easy to delete.
You merge your PR today, not tomorrow. You ship and iterate rather than wait for perfection.
You want to build core banking systems that handle real money, not another CRUD app.
You care about simplicity more than cleverness.
You'd rather own a problem end to end than wait for someone to hand you a spec.
You want to work alongside people who are genuinely great at what they do.

This is not for you if:

You think that a new fancy pattern or architecture principle will solve all your problems.
You think "that's not my problem" is an acceptable answer.
You can not follow other team member’s decisions.
You are closing your macbook at 5pm sharp and don’t care about your work.
You are not passionate about what you do.

Hard Requirements

5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience (backend-focused).
2+ years in early-stage or small startup environments.
Based in Berlin or willing to relocate.

Responsibilities