Platform Engineer - AI procurement Startup Berlin

Cherry Ventures is supporting our portfolio with this hire

Location: Berlin, Germany

Unfortunately at this stage we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this position.

Intro

Forgent AI is on a mission to build AI products for better public procurement. We are looking for a talented Product Engineer to join our founding technical team in Berlin. You'll play a crucial role in shaping our product and technology and building reliable, impactful software for a domain where it truly matters.

The role

As the foundational Platform Engineer at Forgent AI, you will design, implement, and manage the core infrastructure underpinning our products. This is a unique opportunity to join an early-stage, mission-driven company and significantly shape its technical foundations and trajectory. You will tackle unique technical constraints related to AI workloads, data security, and scalability, applying state-of-the-art cloud practices to deliver a frictionless, reliable platform for our developers and highly available systems for our users. Working closely with founders and product engineers, you'll have substantial ownership over the platform's architecture, security, and operations, helping define our infrastructure standards and DevOps culture.

The day-to-day

• Design, build, automate, and maintain core cloud infrastructure on AWS (incl. EC2, Fargate, Lambda, RDS, ECS/EKS, S3, VPC, API Gateway) using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles (Terraform/CloudFormation), focusing on scalability, reliability, security, and cost-efficiency.
• Manage and optimize our database layer, including schema design, performance tuning, backup, and recovery strategies.
• Implement and manage robust security practices across the platform, adhering to AWS security best practices, managing IAM, ensuring data encryption (at rest/transit), configuring authentication/authorization, and supporting security audits.
• Work closely with product engineers and founders to understand application requirements, providing the necessary platform support, infrastructure solutions, and deployment pipelines (CI/CD).
• Take ownership of platform components, ensuring high availability, implementing disaster recovery plans, and managing observability (monitoring, logging, alerting) using tools like CloudWatch.
• Actively collaborate with colleagues through infrastructure design reviews, documentation, knowledge sharing, and providing platform guidance to foster best practices.
• Proactively and independently identify opportunities for improving the platform – including cost optimization, adopting new relevant technologies, enhancing security posture, or streamlining developer workflows – and take initiative to implement them.

You should apply if

• Are a skilled Platform/Infrastructure Engineer with 3+ years of professional experience designing, building, and managing cloud-native infrastructure.
• Have deep, hands-on experience with AWS services (including core compute, storage, database, networking, security, and serverless offerings like EC2, Fargate, S3, RDS, ECS/EKS, Lambda, VPC, IAM, API Gateway).
• Are proficient with Infrastructure as Code tools like AWS CloudFormation for automating infrastructure provisioning and management.
• Possess strong database management skills, particularly with PostgreSQL (including schema design, SQL optimization, backup/recovery).
• Have a good understanding and practical knowledge of cloud security principles (AWS security best practices, IAM, network security, data encryption, vulnerability management) and authentication/authorization mechanisms (OAuth, JWT).
• Have experience designing for and implementing enterprise readiness requirements such as high availability, disaster recovery, scalability, performance optimization, and observability.
• Are an excellent communicator (written and verbal English) who thrives on deep collaboration, including code reviews and asynchronous design discussions.
• Are a hard worker with a strong sense of urgency, who thrives in a fast-moving, high-responsibility environment where direct communication is the norm and speed matters as much as quality.
• Are motivated by ownership, love to work in a fast-paced early-stage startup environment, are genuinely excited by our mission, and actively seek to improve yourself, your colleagues, and the team culture.
• Have impressive achievements from previous careers and from side projects — we’re excited to hear about these!

Nice to have

• Experience specifically supporting AI/ML workloads and associated infrastructure (e.g., GPU instances, data pipelines) on cloud platforms.
• Experience setting up and managing CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
• Familiarity with container orchestration beyond basics (e.g., advanced Kubernetes/ECS configurations, service mesh).
• Experience with implementing and maintaining security and compliance standards, in particular SOC-2 and ISO-27001.
• Scripting skills for automation (e.g., Python, Bash).
• Understanding of German (as our initial product context is German).
• Previous experience founding a company or working in a very early-stage startup.