Pinnipedia is a new Berlin startup building a cloud platform that automates and assists the creation of audit-ready IT-security concepts (e.g., BSI-Grundschutz, C5). We’re IGP-funded (2025/26) and co-develop with FU Berlin and pilot users from industry and security consulting.
We’re hiring an AI Engineer to turn messy inputs into structured knowledge and reliable answers.
Your Mission -Own the end-to-end pipeline that turns unstructured documents into a validated, queryable knowledge graph. Accountable for extraction quality, graph integrity, and the data layer that backs the product's read path.
- LLM extraction pipelines -document chunking, property and relationship extraction, cross-chunk reconciliation, gap detection. Built with structured-output LLM agents orchestrated by durable workflows.
- Knowledge graph -schema design as typed Pydantic models, Cypher access patterns and indexing strategy, graph operations, schema evolution and migration. Scope ends at the graph boundary: API contracts and query abstractions exposed to consumers belong to the full-stack engineer.
- Deterministic rule engines -table-driven evaluators for cases where code beats LLM judgment; clear contracts between deterministic and probabilistic components.
- Data validation & quality -schema enforcement, required-property contracts, audit trails, eval harnesses (expert review, unsupervised checks, synthetic fixtures, LLM-as-judge).
- Live data ops -backfills, coordinated migrations across relational + graph stores, observability on extraction throughput and quality, incident response.
Must-have
- 5+ years shipping data/AI systems to production with real customers -has been on-call for live pipelines and knows what breaks at 2am.
- Strong Python (typed, modern) and SQL. Comfortable with PostgreSQL under load.
- Production experience with at least one graph database (Neo4j preferred; Neptune, ArangoDB, TigerGraph acceptable) -schema design, query tuning, not toy use.
- Production LLM pipeline experience: structured output, agent orchestration, prompt and version management, evaluation frameworks. PydanticAI, LangChain, DSPy, or Instructor all welcome.
- Durable workflow orchestration in production (DBOS, Temporal, Airflow, Prefect, Dagster).
- Test-first discipline -integration tests against real datastores (Testcontainers or equivalent), not mock-heavy unit tests.
- Fluent English skills.
Nice-to-have
- Experience with regulated, compliance-driven, or standards-heavy extraction domains (legal, medical, financial, security/audit).
- Designed deterministic evaluators alongside LLM components and knows when to reach for which.
- Contributions to data contracts, schema governance, or ontology work.
- German language skills.
Hybrid, full-time with flexible scheduling; occasional on-site days in Berlin.
Competitive salary: 60.000–85.000 € base (more for exceptional senior profiles).
Small, focused team; direct collaboration with the Product Owner and Full-Stack Engineer.
Modern tooling, real ownership, and a learning budget for role-relevant training.
Impact: help SMEs meet rising security requirements with less friction.
Apply on JOIN with your CV (PDF) and a short note (max 200 words) describing how you would design a KG-backed RAG pipeline (ontology scope, indexing, retrieval, and evaluation you’d use).
Process: 20-min intro 90-min practical (graph modeling + retrieval evaluation) 45-min team chat references. We review applications within 5 business days.
