Cloud Platform Architect gesucht in Heidelberg

We are therefore looking for a Platform Architect to take end-to-end ownership of Cirql One's technical backbone. You will own the architectural integrity of the Cirql One platform. That includes:

• Owning the core platform architecture that balances scalability, security, speed of execution, and performance
• Making and defending key technology decisions with a long-term view, while staying pragmatic about what matters now.
• Contributing directly to implementation by writing code, reviewing pull requests, and solving hard technical problems alongside the team.
• Establishing architectural patterns that allow semantic assets, data pipelines, and AI-facing interfaces to evolve without fragmentation.

This is a technical leadership role first and foremost. While the role may grow into building or leading a team over time, the initial focus is ownership and execution, not people management.

We are a startup - that means context-switching, wearing multiple hats, and being comfortable with ambiguity. It also means we value people who challenge assumptions, point out flaws, and help us avoid building the wrong thing - not just those who execute instructions.

You will work at the intersection of engineering, product, semantics, and AI.

This involves defining and owning the fundamental platform elements, including how business meaning is represented, versioned, governed, and exposed, ensuring that enterprise data and business logic can be reliably utilized by software and AI.

You will work closely with product and engineering to turn complex, often ambiguous requirements into robust, scalable systems.

Technical Foundation

• 8+ years in software development, with meaningful experience designing and building data-intensive systems
• Hands-on experience with data platforms, ETL/ELT pipelines, and data lake architectures

Architectural Judgment

• Demonstrated ability to design scalable, maintainable systems and make sound trade-offs under uncertainty
• Critical thinking about technology choices - you evaluate tools and approaches based on evidence, not trends

Collaboration and Communication

• Comfortable working in a small, cross-functional team where roles overlap, and ownership is shared
• Ability to explain complex technical concepts to product managers, customers, and fellow engineers
• Self-directed, with the initiative to identify problems and drive solutions without waiting to be asked

Education

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field - or equivalent practical experience

Nice to Have

• Semantic and metadata systems: Experience with data catalogs, ontology mapping, knowledge graphs, or metadata-driven architectures
• Analytics platform background: Prior work at a BI, analytics, or data platform company

• Early-stage impact: You'll shape the architecture of a platform with real enterprise customers, not maintain legacy systems
• Hard problems worth solving: SAP semantics, AI-ready data, and enterprise-scale deployment - this is genuinely difficult work
• Strong team: Work alongside experienced founders and engineers who've built data platforms before
• Growth trajectory: As the platform and company scale, so does the scope of this role

If you like getting in early, making the hard calls, and building the foundation others will later build on, this is the role for you.

The process is simple: a first conversation, followed by a few focused discussions around architecture and how you think. No tests, no theatrics.

About Cirql One We believe the real value of modern enterprises lies in their data. Most large organizations already have the data they need. What they lack is a way to work with it at scale. Over time, meaning gets buried in legacy systems, configurations, customization, and undocumented logic. The data still runs the business, but it can't easily be trusted, reused, or reasoned over consistently by modern software and AI. SAP sits at the center of this problem. It runs the core business process of more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies. SAP has spent decades perfecting systems of record while AI is building systems of reasoning, and the real opportunity lies in connecting the two. SAP systems are deeply embedded, business-critical, and designed to change slowly. They are complex systems, refined over decades to ensure precision and control. Yet while the data is reliable by design, its business meaning is often implicit and difficult for AI systems to interpret, which prevents AI from reasoning over it reliably, safely, and at scale. At Cirql One, we've spent more than 30 years working inside these environments. We know why AI systems struggle to interpret enterprise data correctly, that many existing semantic layers stop at technical abstraction, and why business meaning must be made explicit to scale trust, reuse, and automation. What We Do Cirql One is a startup focused on building the missing link between ERP systems and AI: an SAP-native semantic intelligence layer that gives AI models and agents a shared, business-accurate understanding of enterprise data. Our vision is to be the new system-of-reason sitting above SAP - where intelligence, metrics, and AI automation are defined, governed, and executed. The result is a stable foundation for AI, automation, and analytics that can evolve independently of the underlying systems. Tasks This is a fundamentally unsolved problem at enterprise scale. There is no other established, reusable semantic foundation that enables AI systems to reason correctly and reliably over legacy ERP environments whilst preserving key business meaning as the systems and the business evolve. We are not building a better way to query data. We are building the foundation that allows AI to reason reliably over the business itself. This foundation allows enterprises to scale disruptive AI-driven innovation beyond isolated pilots, without sacrificing trust, governance, or consistency of business meaning.