Senior Backend & Systems Engineer

Who we are

Cartken is a startup at the forefront of autonomous robotics and short-distance material transport. Our team has more than a century of combined experience solving some of the toughest challenges in autonomous vehicles, robotics, and operations at Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. We have robots operating around the world providing reliable and cost-effective short-distance material transport for our industrial customers.

The AI powering our robots makes them the safest and most reliable in the market today.Our robots are equipped with multiple sensors and cameras which allow them to stop on a dime in order to avoid collisions and choose routes which have the fewest hazards.

The AI powering our robots makes them the safest, most reliable and versatile in the market today. Our system runs on small delivery robots as well as industrial robots weighing up to multiple tons. We own the full stack from hardware design & firmware over edge AI to orchestration & management in the cloud. Excellence & value for our customers drives our decisions. We highly value high ownership & high contribution individuals to keep our management & communication structure lean, pleasant & effective.

You can read more about Cartken here.

Our mission

Bring safe and reliable mobile robots to new frontiers.

Why join us

• We’re passionate about applying state-of-the-art technology to solve real-world problems and become the brains behind an automation revolution

• We’re fast and thrive on making an impact

• You get to work with a diverse team of super talented people across USA and Germany

• You’ll also get to build a growing startup and by default do and learn a tonne

What you'll do

• 5+ years of relevant work experience.
• Own the systems managing, configuring, updating and monitoring our robot fleet.
• Help design, implement and validate the next generation of our fleet update and job execution platform.
• Develop backend services and internal tools for operational workflows, job scheduling, configuration management, and fleet maintenance.
• Work on core backend topics such as APIs, service-to-service communication, data modeling, security, reliability, and observability.
• Work on infrastructure topics such as NATS, GCP, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and observability.
• Collaborate closely with robotics and operations teams to turn real-world field & customer requirements into robust technical solutions.

What you bring

• Strong backend, systems, or DevOps engineering experience.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently on broad, sometimes ambiguous technical challenges.
• You enjoy ownership of large systems and push them forward independently
• Experience with distributed systems, Linux-based environments, networking, containers, or infrastructure automation.
• A pragmatic engineering mindset: you care about robustness, reliability, maintainability, and getting useful systems into production.
• Experience in the IoT/Robotics space is a plus
• Strong ownership, curiosity to expand your horizon and ability to drive architecture independently
• Ability to use agentic AI workflows effectively while fully owning the output/outcome.
• Bonus: experience with robotics, fleet management, NATS, MongoDB, Postgres, GCP, CI/CD infrastructure, AWX, Docker, Go, NodeJS or Python.
• You are based in or around Munich and can work on-site (with option for partial home office)