💻 Lead AI-Native Senior Software Engineer (Customer-Facing) bei Forest AI in Berlin

About Forest AI
Forest AI helps companies become benchmark-driven in how they build AI agents. Our customers have understood that AI agent development demands an order of magnitude more testing before release than traditional deterministic software. We build the automated evaluation and testing layer that makes testing at that volume practical, so our customers can put AI into production in places where being wrong is expensive.

The best developers are now part product manager and part project manager of their own army of AI coding agents, and their job is making sure those agents actually deliver what the business truly needs, not just what someone wrote in a ticket. In that world, the bottleneck on an engineering team isn't the speed of producing correct code; it's the speed of understanding the business and communicating clearly.

We are an AI company, extremely bullish on AI-assisted engineering, and our customers are too. We work Claude Code first. If you don't believe in delivering that way, this probably isn't the right fit.

The role

You'll sit between our customers and our platform: take a vague business need, turn it into a system that works, and keep it working.

This is a hands-on senior role. You'll have real autonomy over what gets built and how, and your impact here comes from the systems you build and the customer relationships you own.

• Pick up signal fast. Hear one short sentence in the middle of a meeting, recognise that it carries real information about what the business needs, work out what the speaker actually wants without being given much detail, and go deliver it.
• Own outcomes to completion. We want someone we can drop into a project and say "automate this manual customer workflow," and three months later it just works, without anyone having to direct every detail.
• Own customer satisfaction. We build the most elegant and robust software we can, but if the customer doesn't understand its value or see the ROI, that software gets thrown out. So everyone here keeps the discipline of writing down why a feature matters to the customer. Sometimes that lands in a presentation. When it doesn't, it lands in the commit message or the PR description.
• Be the person others plan around. When you say you'll carry something to the end at high quality, colleagues and customers can build their own plans on top of that. Earning that kind of trust is the thing we hire for hardest.
• Push the business for clarity. You'll press for decisions where the right AI behaviour can't be intuited, or where the data to decide it doesn't exist yet.

What we're looking for

• Several years building and running production software that real customers depend on: APIs, backend services, data pipelines, and the operational reality of keeping them up.
• A track record of owning a customer-facing build from zero to production, ideally more than once.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and agent frameworks in real production systems, not just prototypes.
• Strong engineering discipline around automated testing, CI/CD, and monitoring. Evaluation and testing are our product, so this matters more here than it does in most places.
• Real time spent in a customer-facing role. That could be consulting, forward deployed engineering, founding your own company, or an in-house role where you sat with the business. What matters is that you've already run requirements conversations, held technical discussions with a customer's own engineers, and built the judgment to separate the requests that genuinely drive return from the wishes, curiosities, and minor conveniences that arrive alongside them.
• We mostly work in TypeScript, alongside Python and cloud infrastructure. The language you've written most of your code in so far matters far less than how quickly you become productive.

Logistics

Full time. Fully remote, with roughly 10% travel. We hire across Europe and welcome applications from anywhere in the region.

Our working language is English. Professional working proficiency in German is a strong advantage: a significant share of the data you'll work with is in German, as are many of our customers and their end users. AI translation gets you a long way, but it will slow you down on exactly the details that matter.

Arbeitsorte

• Berlin