Staff Software Engineer (m/w/d)

About Sharpist

At Sharpist, our mission is clear: to empower everyone to lead a self‑aware career and life.

We make coaching accessible for all – anytime, anywhere.

We’re building a hybrid coaching experience: genuine 1:1 coaching for empathy and accountability, combined with an AI Coach for quick insights, follow‑ups, and in‑the‑moment support.

Our goal: to make coaching scalable – not to replace humans, but to enhance them. Human and intelligent.

🎥 Meet our AI Coach in action — and see how Sharpist empowers leaders and talents to grow every day:

The Role

You get a business problem and you own it from there: solution concept, PRD, implementation, release, and measuring whether it worked. No hand-off, no shipping blind. We're working toward a one-week cycle, but we're not there yet. We'd rather ship at ~70% and learn from real usage than polish in private.

The hard part isn't the coding. It's the synthesis: going from a fuzzy problem to a technically sound, scoped solution fast enough to keep the cycle moving. That's where most engineers slow down. That's the gap this role fills.

LLMs handle a growing share of the implementation. What they can't replace is the judgment to know when the architecture is wrong, when an abstraction won't hold, when a shortcut becomes next quarter's incident. Catching that before it's built, not after.

What you’ll do

First 30 days:

• Get deep into the Sharpist product: the AI Coach, the coaching platform, the learner journey

• Audit existing solution concepts and PRDs; understand what's shipping and why

• Shadow one full problem-to-delivery cycle with the engineering team

• Ship your first small improvements or bug fixes

First quarter:

• Own your first problem end-to-end: define the problem space, design the solution, write the PRD

• Use LLMs as a core workflow tool: prompt for specs, evaluate for efficiency and soundness, iterate

• Work directly with engineers to ensure what gets built matches what was intended

• Talk directly to users and stakeholders to ground each problem in real insight, not assumptions

• Give structured feedback on PRDs from others: technical feasibility, scope, edge cases

Year one:

• Own multiple features end-to-end: define, ship, measure, and know what worked and what didn't

• Contribute to the team's weekly give & take: share what you learned, pick up what others discovered

• Make the developer experience meaningfully better: tooling, workflow, or process improvements the team actually uses

The Stack

TypeScript, React, React Native, Node.js, MongoDB, Redis, Docker, Google Cloud, BigQuery, Google Dataform, Lightdash, Prometheus, Grafana.

Working Model

Hybrid in Berlin, 3 days per week in the office. We find that being together in person is what builds the kind of relationships where real conversations happen: the ones that change how you think, how you work, and how the product evolves.

Who You Are

Must-haves:

• You think like a Product Engineer: you've had full ownership of feature development, defining the solution, not just building what someone else specified

• You can write a clear, technically grounded PRD, and you know what makes one bad

• You have a strong intuition for UX: what confuses users, what creates friction, what feels right

• You use AI/LLM tools as a core part of how you work, across specs, prototyping, and implementation, not as a gimmick. Self-directed experiments and side projects count as evidence

• You can spot what LLMs miss: a wrong abstraction, a brittle data model, a spec that looks fine until it hits production

• Fluent English (written and spoken)

Nice to have:

• Experience building AI/LLM product features (prompting, evaluation, guardrails)

• Worked in a B2B SaaS or HR tech environment

What We Value

• Ownership: When ownership is unclear, you step forward. When you're blocked, you find a solution; you don't shift the problem up

• Clarity: You write specs that don't need a meeting to explain

• Judgment: You know when something is technically sound vs. technically plausible-but-painful

• Speed: You move fast without creating rework for others

• Mission belief: You genuinely care about helping people. That's why you're here

What We Offer

• Unlimited Coaching: Access