Data & AI Engineer

About Team Passerelle

Team Passerelle, established in Berlin in 2025, is an AI consultancy rooted in a union-related background. Our mission is to bridge the future by enabling genuine technological progress while promoting improved working conditions under the guiding principle: Good AI. Good Work.

Founded by seasoned professionals from the tech, consulting, and applied AI science fields, we combine strategic C-level foresight with deep technical expertise. We support organizations and institutions on their journey towards an AI-driven future, offering services from strategic advisory to value-driven technical implementation and sustainable operational adoption. Alongside our transformation mandates, we develop proprietary software products aimed at digital sovereignty.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct comprehensive data inventories across heterogeneous sources and assess the maturity of digital foundations, pinpointing essential gaps in identifiers and metadata to identify leverage points.
• Enable AI data ingestion by transforming unstructured data sources such as PDFs, reports, and publications into usable formats through text extraction, chunking strategies, and metadata creation using tools like LlamaParse and Unstructuredio.
• Design and implement metadata and identifier concepts, data models, and embedding pipelines to establish a retrieval foundation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications, including populating and managing vector databases such as Qdrant, Weaviate, and pgvector, ensuring continuous quality evaluation.
• Manage sensitive data responsibly, aligning closely with AI governance, data protection (including the EU AI Act), and sovereignty requirements, emphasizing data minimization and protection from the outset.
• Develop and maintain ingestion and retrieval pipelines for internal software products with a DataOps mindset focusing on versioning, testing, and observability, as well as understanding agent-based patterns including human-in-the-loop processes.

Qualifications

• Extensive Data Engineering background with over 3 years of experience, especially in complex, evolved data environments. Proficiency in Python and SQL, familiarity with modern data stack tools such as dbt, Airflow, and Dagster, and expertise in ETL/ELT pipelines.
• Hands-on experience enabling AI, including managing embedding pipelines and vector databases (Qdrant, Weaviate, Milvus, pgvector), alongside a strong intuition for retrieval strategies and processing unstructured data formats.
• Strong awareness of data privacy considerations and compliance, including GDPR and EU AI Act, with proven experience handling sensitive and personal data conscientiously.
• Pragmatic approach to real-world data challenges, comfortable working with incomplete and legacy datasets, prioritizing practical, usable models over perfection.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate complex data realities for non-technical stakeholders; fluent in German and English; self-driven with a solution-oriented mindset aligned with our values of equitable future work environments.

Additional advantages include experience with knowledge graphs, semantic layers, text-to-SQL interfaces, a pronounced DataOps perspective, and enthusiasm for building proof-of-concept projects.

Benefits

• Meaningful Impact & Values-Driven Environment: Work at the nexus of technological innovation and societal responsibility, helping shape AI transformation aligned with European democratic values.
• High Visibility & Networking: Gain exposure to prestigious mandates from politics, business, and labor unions.
• Significant Autonomy: Flexible flat structures without micromanagement, granting genuine ownership of your projects and responsibilities.
• Flexible Work Setup: Remote-first arrangement with a core team in Berlin and working hours adapted to your personal life.
• Established Standards: 30 vacation days, dedicated budget for professional development, and state-of-the-art work equipment.
• Competitive Compensation: Transparent salary range of 80,000 to 95,000 euros gross annually based on a 40-hour workweek, commensurate with experience.

Additional Information

This role is initially offered with a fixed-term contract of one year due to the company’s agile startup phase. Given the sustainable growth trajectory, a long-term collaboration is a clear goal. Extension or conversion to a permanent position is highly anticipated contingent on mandate and business development.

Our core mission is the social partnership-driven design of AI transformation—from equitable distribution of productivity gains through digital sovereignty to envisioning a fair working world tomorrow. We seek thoughtful, solution-oriented professionals unafraid to challenge assumptions and eager to actively build the bridge to the future.

Applicants whose profiles do not perfectly match are encouraged to apply; personal motivation and perspective are valued above a flawless CV. Join us in shaping a young company and leaving your mark on the future of work.