<![CDATA[Ampli Berlin]]>https://ampli.substack.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0K2P!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7ba2d510-b0a4-4288-9837-feab24b20d68_1200x1200.pngAmpli Berlinhttps://ampli.substack.comSubstackTue, 01 Sep 2026 13:02:06 GMT<![CDATA[#103: A soft return. Jobs, events, and what's happening.]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/103-a-soft-return-jobs-events-andhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/103-a-soft-return-jobs-events-andMon, 31 Aug 2026 06:02:21 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community.

After a small summer break, we're back! And we've been cooking up some really interesting projects behind the scenes. But the comeback still feels a bit dreamy, and Berlin still feels slow.

As we head into the final months of the year, we’d love to hear from you: what kind of gatherings, speakers, content, or partnerships would make Ampli more useful to you? Lets us know in the comments or drop us a line at connect@ampli.xyz

Now, let’s get into it.

🚀 The AMPLI Board of Jobs “this week's Top Picks”

The Ampli Board

🤖 Forward Deployed Engineer, Agentic Platform — Cohere · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Production-grade Python, hands-on experience shipping RAG and agentic LLM applications (vector databases, orchestration frameworks), strong evaluation-framework skills, and confidence leading technical discussions with enterprise customers.

🎨 Senior Product Designer — Sell Online — SumUp · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: A strong end-to-end product-design portfolio with real visual craft in typography and layout, consumer product experience on web and mobile, and proven contribution to design systems at scale.

🛒 Product Manager, Search — Wolt · Lead · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Proven consumer PM experience on relevance- or ranking-driven products, fluency with search measurement, strong data literacy, and the ability to work deeply with ML and engineering on ranking.

⚙️ Senior Software Engineer FullStack — Kotlin / React — Doctolib · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 6+ years of fullstack experience with strong Kotlin and React/TypeScript, sound system design in complex environments, and solid SDLC practices, automated testing, CI/CD, you-build-it-you-run-it.

🚀 Senior Cloud Engineer — ClickHouse · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 6+ years building and operating fault-tolerant distributed systems, deep Kubernetes tooling (Helm, Kustomize, Istio), Go or Python for automation, and cloud experience across AWS/Azure/GCP plus PostgreSQL/MongoDB know-how.

📱 Senior Android Engineer — Dott · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Deep Android expertise with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, experience architecting a large Android codebase and owning Play Store releases end to end, and clear English communication.

💻 Software Engineer, Foundation — Knowunity · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: A few years of production mobile or web experience (they build with Flutter/Dart), daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex or similar), a sharp eye for design detail, and clear English.

💰 Backend Engineer — HolidayPirates Group · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 2–3 years of backend experience, Clojure skills or genuine interest in learning it, functional-programming fundamentals, daily AI-assisted/agentic coding, and experience with relational and key-value stores.

🎓 Working Student Jobs

🚀 Founder & Startup Roles

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of events!

🖥 High-signal content and news

Hugging Face just launched an open-source robot duck and Nvidia may be about to buy the whole company — Microduck is a 25cm bipedal robot with 15 motors, LiDAR, a grasping beak, and a full reinforcement learning training stack on GitHub. Train new behaviours in simulation, deploy to hardware. Pre-orders open now, shipping before Christmas. The launch drops at an awkward moment: Bloomberg and The Information both report Nvidia is in talks to acquire Hugging Face at a ~$13B valuation, unconfirmed, no comment from either company.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data · 🔬 Researchers

OpenAI is building AI agents for everything — Andrew Ambrosino, lead engineer for OpenAI’s desktop app, has given ChatGPT Work access to his entire digital life: inbox, Slack, Notion, Figma, his phone. Available at $20/month. The product represents OpenAI’s shift from specialised coding tools to general-purpose agents for everyone, and its biggest question: how much of your digital life are you willing to hand an LLM before the upside outweighs the risk of it pulling from a private DM it wasn’t supposed to see? The early-adopter answer from Ambrosino: “I’ll take the personal hit. And I haven’t had to yet.”
ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

Nanolope — a TU Berlin spinout — just raised €800K to turn building facades into thermal batteries — The round is tiny but the technology is not: Nanolope’s phase-change materials store up to 24x more heat than gypsum board and integrate into existing walls, roofs, and facades without structural changes. IBB Ventures and angels from energy, real estate, and materials tech backed the pre-seed. With 14 million poorly insulated German buildings and a mandatory retrofit wave arriving under EU energy law, the TAM is structural rather than speculative.
ERT: 3–5 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin

AI raised the floor of design quality. “Impeccable by Design” is about raising the ceiling — Paul Bakaus (a16z) coined “2026 slop” — the Instrument Serif italic headline on warm beige that’s everywhere because that’s what AI reaches for when nobody is steering. Once a pattern is ubiquitous it stops signalling taste and starts signalling the absence of a decision. “Stripping slop is the side quest. The main quest is amplifying human intent.” .
ERT: 8–10 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

Pasqal just became Europe’s first quantum computing company to list on Nasdaq — The Paris-based startup (neutral-atom quantum processors, spun out of Institut d’Optique) began trading on Nasdaq this week, marking the first public quantum computing listing from a European lab. It joins a public market where IonQ and Rigetti have struggled with profitability — but Pasqal’s neutral-atom architecture and European institutional backing give it a different risk profile.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🔬 Researchers · 📰 News

Meta just open-sourced a 30B-parameter model that runs local AI agents on your Mac — Muse Glimmer, released August 10, is a distilled version of Meta’s most powerful closed model (Muse Spark), quantized to under 20GB so it runs on a single consumer GPU. Apache 2.0 licence — download, modify, deploy. Optimised specifically for local agent workflows, function calling, and LLM-as-a-judge evaluation. Accompanied by a Zuckerberg manifesto on “individual empowerment” and the risks of concentrating AI power — and a promise to release the full Muse Spark 1.2 weights soon.
ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

Google’s A2A and Anthropic’s MCP are now under the same neutral governance roof — and every major AI lab signed — On August 17, Google’s Agent-to-Agent protocol (A2A) joined the Agentic AI Foundation alongside MCP, putting the two dominant open standards for the agent economy under a single Linux Foundation-directed body. A2A handles how agents talk to each other (horizontal); MCP handles how agents connect to tools and data (vertical). Together they form the protocol stack for the agentic economy. AWS, Anthropic, Block, Bloomberg, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are all platinum signatories. For engineering teams building multi-agent systems: the era of proprietary agent protocols is effectively over.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

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]]><![CDATA[#102: The EU AI Act, "Sci-fi like" cyber incident, call for a slowdown frontier AI and more. ]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/102-the-eu-ai-act-sci-fi-like-cyberhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/102-the-eu-ai-act-sci-fi-like-cyberMon, 03 Aug 2026 06:02:52 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community,

August has officially arrived.

Some of you are on holiday, some are planning one, and some of us are still in Berlin pretending the city has slowed down; it hasn’t 😅

This week, we’ve got fresh jobs, plenty of community events, and some important AI and tech stories to catch up on.

Whether you’re reading this from a beach, an airport, or your desk in Berlin,
here’s what’s worth knowing ↓

🚀 The AMPLI Board of Jobs “this week's Top Picks”

The Ampli Board

🤖 Member of Technical Staff — Machine Learning Engineer, Search — Perplexity · Lead · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 5+ years building large-scale search or recommender systems, a deep understanding of retrieval and ranking-quality metrics, and a proven track record taking ML search projects from research to production.

🎨 UX/UI Designer — Bending Spoons · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Strong product-design fundamentals in Figma, comfort making engineering-aware decisions from requirements through QA and release, and a data-driven eye for funnels, retention, and adoption.

👔 Senior Product Manager — Hack The Box · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 3–5 years of B2B SaaS product management with enterprise customers, hands-on experience with analytics tools (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Tableau, or Metabase), and strong agile/scrum practice working closely with engineering.

🚀 Junior DevOps Engineer — Flix · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Solid Python and Linux fundamentals and fluent English, with an interest in CI/CD and cloud platforms — Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, and Prometheus/Grafana are a plus.

💻 Frontend Engineer — Agentic AI — CUBE · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Strong hands-on React and TypeScript, a solid grasp of component-based architecture and RESTful APIs, and experience writing automated, maintainable tests with Git-based workflows.

⚙️ Fullstack Engineer — HealthTech Founding Team — Caidera · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Fullstack experience with Next.js, TypeScript, and Node.js, a (business) computer-science background, fluent German, and a startup builder’s mindset to help shape the product from the founding team.

📊 Data Engineer II. Quick Commerce — Delivery Hero · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Strong Python data-engineering skills, hands-on experience building scalable pipelines (Airflow, PostgreSQL) on cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform), and solid CI/CD practices.

🛒 Senior Product Designer — Kleinanzeigen · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior product-design experience on B2C platforms, strong concept and interaction design, fluency with design systems, and hands-on usability testing in an agile environment.

🎓 Working Student Jobs

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

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🖥 High-signal content and news

An OpenAI agent escaped its secure environment and autonomously hacked Hugging Face — In late July, an advanced OpenAI model being tested in a sandboxed environment independently discovered and exploited multiple zero-day vulnerabilities, breaching Hugging Face and at least one customer account at a cloud computing company. Altman called it "the first security incident I've felt very viscerally" and an "extremely sci-fi cyber incident."
ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News

The EU AI Act enters its main enforcement phase today — August 2 is not a quiet date, despite the high-risk deadline shift to December 2027. What activates today: Article 50 chatbot disclosure (every conversational AI must identify itself as AI at the start of an interaction), AI-generated content watermarking and labeling, and the EU AI Office's fining powers over GPAI providers, with penalties up to €15M or 3% of global turnover. If your AI feature talks to users and doesn't say it's AI, you're out of compliance as of this morning.
ERT: 6–8 min · 📰 News · 🎨 Design & PMs

AI researchers and engineers just publicly asked governments to slow down frontier AI — "Pacing the Frontier" is the employee-driven petition that OpenAI and Anthropic both backed this week. Signatories include researchers at both labs calling for an international framework capable of throttling frontier AI development pacing. The Axios piece maps the prisoner's dilemma at the centre of the conversatio, no single lab can afford to slow down alone, which is why they need governments to mandate it jointly.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🔬 Researchers

AI agent governance just became a funded category — Hush Security raised $30M from Akamai, Battery Ventures, and YL Ventures to build identity and governance tooling for AI agents, who an agent is, what it's allowed to do, and how to audit what it actually did. Crunchbase data from the same week shows AI-security startups have already raised $855M across 150+ seed rounds in 2026 alone. The containment breach and the governance funding wave landed in the same news cycle.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

GitHub just shipped stacked pull requests in public preview — Stacked PRs let you break a large change into ordered, reviewable layers — each targeting the one below — and merge the whole stack in one click. No more giant PRs nobody wants to review, no more manual rebasing across branches. NextJS lead Tim Neutkens, jQuery creator John Resig, and TED CTO Andy Merryman all quote in the launch post. Works with GitHub’s existing branch protections, required checks, and merge queue.
ERT: 3–5 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

The next AI moat isn’t a better model — it’s a faster learning loop — Peter Ludwig (CTO, Applied Intuition) makes the case that physical AI’s bottleneck isn’t model quality — it’s the engineering system that turns intelligence into deployed machines. Two companies with access to the same frontier model will have wildly different outcomes based on how fast they can validate, integrate, ship, and learn from the field. Applied Intuition’s agentic platform “Dana” made development cycles 20x faster — and revealed the compounding flywheel: better models speed up the learning loop, a faster loop makes the models better, each turn compounds.
ERT: 10–15 min · 🔬 Researchers · 🚀 Founders

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]]><![CDATA[#101: Holding each other close in Berlin.]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/101-holding-each-other-close-in-berlinhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/101-holding-each-other-close-in-berlinMon, 27 Jul 2026 06:02:37 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community.

After Saturday’s attack at Berlin’s Pride this Monday feels a bit heavier, we want to extend our solidarity with all victims of the attack and our sincere condolences to all who are mourning today. Moments like this remind us how important it is to listen, to show up with love and support for the LGBTQ+ community, and to hold space for the people around us. Berlin is a city of freedom, diversity, and openness. Hate and violence don’t get to decide how we live or whom we love. This is a moment to be present for one another, and to stand together.

If you or someone you know is looking for support, a few places to turn to in Berlin: Schwulenberatung Berlin for counseling and mental health support, Sonntags-Club for community and social connection, and MANEO for anti-violence help and victim support.

Wishing you a gentle week ahead.

🚀 The AMPLI Board of Jobs “this week's Top Picks”

The Ampli Board

🤖 Product Manager — Helsing · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Proven end-to-end product management owning discovery through delivery, spanning commercial strategy, go-to-market and technical architecture, working directly with customers and engineers; German security-clearance eligibility a plus

⚙️ Senior Software Engineer — Platform & Reliability — Qdrant · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 5–7+ years in platform engineering or SRE, strong Go and Python, hands-on Kubernetes operator development, a solid distributed-systems foundation, plus CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code and cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure); comfort with on-call

📊 Senior Data Engineer — Better Planner — Bettermile · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior data engineer with strong Python and SQL building production pipelines on a modern stack (dbt, Snowflake, AWS), ideally with ML exposure, to power large-scale route-planning and last-mile delivery optimisation

🎨 Product Designer — Gigs · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior product designer crafting web and mobile experiences across a cohesive design system and visual identity, fluent in Figma, partnering with product and engineering to turn complex telecom workflows into simple, fast flows

💰 Head of Product — Lending — N26 · Director · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Proven senior product-management leadership with P&L ownership, lending-domain expertise (consumer loans, credit lines, BNPL, or mortgages), a track record building high-performing teams, and sharp, data-driven product decisions at scale

🚀 Development Operations Engineer — SAP Cloud Infrastructure — SAP · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 5–8 years in DevOps/infrastructure with deep hands-on Kubernetes operations (upgrades, ingress, service meshes, cert-manager), multi-cloud mastery (AWS/Azure/GCP) and Infrastructure-as-Code; OpenStack and CKA/CKAD/CKS a plus

📱 Founding Mobile Engineer (React Native) — acemate.ai · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: React Native and TypeScript mobile engineering with the drive to own product end-to-end as a founding engineer at an early-stage (pre-seed) AI learning startup moving fast

💻 Product Engineer, Frontend — muffintech · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Strong TypeScript and React, comfort owning the full frontend independently from design to shipped feature (REST integration, Figma-to-code), and effective use of modern AI-assisted tooling

🎓 Working Student Jobs

🚀 Founder & Startup Roles

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of events!

🖥 High-signal content and news

China just did DeepSeek again — Moonshot’s Kimi K3 went viral, crashed its own servers in 48 hours, and rattled Washington — Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 17 at the World AI Conference in Shanghai: an open-weight model trained on 2.8 trillion parameters that matches or beats current OpenAI and Anthropic models on most benchmarks, and is free to download and self-host. Demand was so high it halted new subscriptions within two days. Unlike proprietary US models, open-weight means no API lock-in, developers download, modify, and run it on their own infrastructure.
ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News

AI agents need to pay for things, and Natural just raised $30M to build the payments layer for the agentic economy — Natural, 193 days old and pre-revenue, just closed a $30M Series A led by Forerunner to build: agent wallets, multi-bank settlement, fraud detection, and agent identity verification in a stack it owns end-to-end. CEO Lalji’s projection: “The number of payments that may occur in the world could be two to four orders of magnitude greater than today’s volume.” First pilots running with major LLM providers. The category is forming fast, Ralio (London), Paygentic, and Stripe itself are all working on versions of this.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🚀 Founders

Berlin’s Omio acquires Rail Europe and raises $10M to bet on Asia’s 710 million annual visitors — Omio (founded as GoEuro in Berlin in 2013, 600M+ raised, 1 billion users/year) acquired Rail Europe, a near-century-old rail ticketing company with 22,000 travel agencies across Asia, and closed a $10M investment from Granite-Integral (Singapore/Tokyo-listed PE) to fuel expansion into Japan and Southeast Asia. CEO Naren Shaam’s: “90% of travel companies focus on air, hotel, and car rental. Ground transit isn’t fully developed on a global platform” and Asia’s 710M forecast visitors this year are increasingly travelling lesser-known corridors best served by rail and bus.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin

Hiring posts are better sales signals than funding announcements — By the time you email a company about their Series A, 30 other vendors already have. A founder posting “we’re hiring an SDR” has just published their pipeline problem, approved budget, and a rough three-month timeline in public. Search LinkedIn posts from the past week for “we’re hiring” + the role your product could replace or support, filter for founder-written posts at companies under 200 people, and show up with a result before the new hire finishes ramping.
ERT: 2–3 min · 🚀 Founders

A new startup backed by OpenAI and Anthropic researchers is trying to break CUDA’s grip on AI inference — Infinity raised $15M to build inference software that lets LLMs run natively on non-Nvidia chips — AMD, Google TPUs, Apple Metal — without CUDA translation layers. Researchers from both OpenAI and Anthropic backing a startup designed to reduce Nvidia dependency is a quiet but direct statement about where the industry’s infrastructure bottleneck sits. Backed by Touring Capital, Principal VC, and ~20 individual AI researchers.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

Your internal developer platform is failing because of product thinking, not technology — Platform Engineering’s Mallory Haigh makes the case that most IDP initiatives die not because the tech is flawed, but because teams treat developers as captive users instead of customers with choices. Five principles: treat devs as customers (they can always find workarounds), measure developer outcomes not infrastructure uptime, commit to continuous evolution not fixed delivery, build golden paths that enable autonomy, and track developer NPS as a leading indicator.
ERT: 10–15 min · 🎨 Design & PMs · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

We want you, and/or your bestie ;) Join our team!

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]]><![CDATA[We Made It to 100 💜]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/we-made-it-to-100https://ampli.substack.com/p/we-made-it-to-100Mon, 20 Jul 2026 05:50:06 GMT

Hey 👋 Ampli community and beyond

Issue #100 feels like a moment to pause and appreciate how far we’ve come.

When we started Ampli, the goal was always bigger than publishing a newsletter.

We wanted to build a real community around Berlin tech one that helps people find the right jobs, discover the rooms worth showing up to, learn from each other, and meet people they might otherwise never cross paths with.

The newsletter became the rhythm that kept us moving.

A huge thank you to the Ampli team, our contributors, speakers, partners, sponsors, and everyone who has read, shared, attended, introduced us to someone, or supported us along the way.

Here’s to the next 100 💜

And if you’d like to write, speak, host, sponsor, or build something with Ampli, please reach out.

Attia, Monica, Nada, and Kenzy 👶🏼

Nada, Kenzy 👶🏼 , Attia, and Monica,

🚀 The AMPLI Board of Jobs “this week's Top Picks”

The Ampli Board

📊 Data Scientist — mobile.de · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Early-career data scientist comfortable with Python, SQL and modern ML/GenAI frameworks (PyTorch/TensorFlow) on AWS or GCP, eager to ship in an agile team

🤖 Senior Machine Learning Engineer — Peregrine.ai · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Strong Python and deep-learning experience (PyTorch/TensorFlow), a solid ML/robotics foundation, and a track record of taking models from research to production

⚙️ Software Engineer (Python) — Audatic · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Strong Python plus a taste for infrastructure work — Docker, Postgres/MongoDB, cloud compute and CI/CD — to build and own the tooling behind Audatic’s deep-learning experiments

📱 Senior Product Engineer — iOS/Swift — Qonto · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior iOS engineer fluent in Swift with strong CI/CD habits and a product mindset for building polished, reliable mobile apps

🎨 Senior Product Designer — Moss · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior product designer with a strong portfolio of shipped, complex product work and the craft to define end-to-end flows for AI-driven features

🛒 Product Manager, Consumer Platform — AUTO1 Group · Lead · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Experienced product manager who can set strategy, work cross-functionally with marketing and engineering, and ship customer-facing product in an agile environment

🚀 Platform Engineer — DigitalService · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Mid-level platform/DevOps engineer with Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm and CI/CD experience (Python or Java), building self-service infrastructure; German helpful

💻 Senior Frontend Engineer — Hostaway · Senior · Remote
Min. Requirement: 6+ years building SaaS frontends with React, TypeScript and JavaScript, solid state management (Redux) and testing (Jest/Cypress), plus a11y and performance best practices; AWS a plus

Working Student Jobs

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

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🖥 High-signal content and news


🔥 Uber is buying Berlin’s Delivery Hero for $14.8B, one of the year’s biggest tech deals 🇩🇪
Uber agreed to buy Delivery Hero at €41.50 a share, a $14.8B equity value, lifting its economic interest to roughly 53%. The combined platform spans 99 markets and did $236B in gross bookings last year. For Berlin it cuts both ways. The city’s most global consumer-tech export is being absorbed by a US giant, but Uber has committed to keep the Berlin HQ open and German headcount intact through 2029, plus €2B of German investment by 2031. Closing isn’t expected before H2 2027, regulators permitting. The thing to watch: does Berlin keep the talent and the decisions, or just the address?
ERT: 5–7 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🚀 Founders

The other side of the table: Berlin’s Omio buys 90-year-old Rail Europe 🇩🇪
While Delivery Hero was getting bought, another Berlin champion went shopping. Omio agreed to acquire French rail distributor Rail Europe, creating one of the world’s largest ground-transport booking platforms: 22 million train tickets a year, 70+ countries, 28,000 operators. The bet is that cross-border rail booking, still messy and fragmented, consolidates into a handful of super-aggregators. Omio wants to be one of them. For Berlin, this is the healthier half of the week’s M&A story. A local company scaling by buying, not by being bought.
ERT: 3–5 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🚀 Founders

Helsing raises $1.8B at an $18B valuation, Europe’s biggest-ever defence round 🇩🇪
Munich’s Helsing closed a $1.8B Series E with Goldman, JPMorgan, Lightspeed, General Catalyst and Canada’s CPP all in, landing at $18B just five years after founding. Its stack runs from the HX-2 strike drone to the Altra battlefield software, with a CA-1 autonomous fighter on the roadmap. That makes it one of the most valuable defence assets on the continent, and it stayed majority-European-owned. “Sovereign capability” has gone from policy slogan to investable thesis, and the money and talent are following it into German defence tech.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🚀 Founders

The frontier labs all shipped at once, and the game moved from “best model” to “best fit”
In the span of days, OpenAI split GPT-5.6 into three tiers (Sol for reasoning, Terra for cheap quality, Luna for volume), xAI dropped Grok 4.5, Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5, and Moonshot’s Kimi K3 landed on July 16. No single benchmark is the story. What changed is that price, latency and fit now decide which model you actually reach for. The question for anyone building on top is no longer “which model is smartest” but “which model is right for this exact call.” If your architecture hard-codes one, that’s now a liability.
ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News

Addy Osmani: AI writes 4× the code for a tenth more value, and the whole gap is review
Osmani’s sharpest piece in a while says the productivity story is real but mismeasured. Agents balloon raw output while pushing quality and reviewability down, so the leverage has moved to code review. His fix is to treat review as the senior skill and invest in the specs and tests that make delegation safe. That reframes what “10x with AI” actually costs. If your team counts AI wins in lines shipped, this resets the scoreboard.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering & Data

Figma’s “Intelligent Canvas”: design, code and AI agents collapsing into one surface
At Config and a Seoul unveiling this week, Figma pushed “Code Layer” (code as a first-class design layer), motion and shader tools, and agents across FigJam and Slides. The pitch is to become a full-stack creation platform. One number stands out: designers involved in the build process jumped from 21% to 41% in a single year. The line between “designed” and “shipped” is dissolving, and product-team roles are being redrawn around it.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

The junior-developer squeeze is real. Here’s how to get through it
Entry-level dev postings are down roughly 60% from 2022, and employment for 22-to-25-year-old engineers has fallen about 20% from its peak, because one senior plus AI now does what a small team used to. The path that still works looks less like “learn to code” and more like “prove judgement”: systems thinking, code reading, a live project with real users and a postmortem in the README. Forward this to anyone early in their career who’s wondering whether the ladder still exists. It does. The bottom rungs just moved.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🌱 Entry Level

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]]><![CDATA[Interview Brian Product Designer at Notion from SF]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/interview-brian-product-designerhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/interview-brian-product-designerThu, 16 Jul 2026 08:22:01 GMTBrian Lovin is a Product Designer building AI products at Notion, and someone whose thinking on how product design is shifting has quietly shaped how a lot of us are approaching the current moment.

We talked about job title, how to hire for beyond output, why side projects still matter, and what he’s noticed building for a global audience from the US while now seeing Europe up close.

Here’s the conversation.

— The Job Title Disruption

You’ve redesigned the designer workflow so that live prototypes ship in minutes. That quietly restructures the classic PM → designer → engineer triangle. Which part of the traditional product process do you think is the most ready for disruption, and what are PMs and product leaders still struggling to embrace or let go?

BRIAN: It’s really, really hard to predict anything right now. Anyone confidently predicting the future is not going to be right. We’re just in an interesting time where everything feels quite blurry, which is good.
Designers are certainly writing more code than they’ve ever written before, probably with the help of AI. More PMs are probably designing and prototyping than ever before with AI. Engineers, same thing.
So I think the biggest opportunity for disruption right now is people willing to break outside of their job title. Don’t be constrained by what your job title says you should do. If the goal is for us to build useful software that solves problems for people, and we finally have this set of tools that makes it really easy to step at least one step outside of your job title and try something, make something, that feels right for disruption.
And people seem to be doing that quite quickly. Everyone I talk to, designers are maybe even ahead of the curve on this, trying Claude Code and prototyping in code.
What product leaders need to adapt for is: how do we get to the point where designers can prototype something quite realistic and have it ship safely? How do we avoid it becoming slop? How do we avoid it causing a very long queue of code review, pulling in engineers to review sloppy work, not because the designer doesn’t care, but because the AI is still quite nascent, or the prompting was very exploratory and not intended to go to production?
All of a sudden, we need to take those ideas and figure out how to deploy them safely, make them secure, and not take up everyone’s time. If we can solve that, then you end up with more people able to contribute to a production codebase and ship features faster with less process. We have to figure out how to do it safely, with the right guardrails, and hopefully keep quality high.

— Hiring for depth

When AI handles execution, the things that actually matter shift, things like taste, judgment, curiosity, depth of experience. But those are notoriously hard to define and even harder to hire for. How do you actually assess whether someone has that depth? And do you think it can be developed, or is it something you either show up with or you don’t?

BRIAN: It’s a tough situation. I think the way you could have asked before — before 2023, maybe 2024 — was: “Have you shipped software before? Was the software good? Did it solve real problems?” And if the answer to those was yes, that person is probably well-known to have known how to ship things.

It became fuzzier during 2024, as more and more of this shifted to AI. I suppose the evaluation is still going to be fuzzy, but it’s something like: you’re going to know it when you see it. Has this person shipped a real thing that solves a real problem for real people? Have they worked on it for a non-trivial amount of time?

It’s easy to be a weekend warrior and bring a hacky project from your phone in 20 minutes. But can you iterate? Can you show it to your customers? Can you do it, do it, do it, do it? I think people who can talk about that, who can demonstrate they’ve done it over time, with or without AI, are in a great position.

The main thing for people using AI to make software for the first time, who might not have known how to make software before, is: can you do it while also building an understanding of how software works? You want to end up in a place where you understand the thing you’ve created and can iterate on it — without contributing to a mountain of tech debt that will eventually crumble, or is insecure, or will leak people’s information. You need to have some understanding of what’s happening.

I think it’s a special type of person who’s willing to go a little extra mile to interrogate what they’ve made with AI — to understand what’s happening underneath it.

— Side Projects as the New Portfolio

You’ve consistently shipped things alongside your main work — Shiori, Tax UI, App Dissection, Staff Design. Now that AI makes building cheaper and faster, is the side project becoming the new portfolio? What separates a side project that shows genuine potential from one that’s just a distraction?

BRIAN: I think side projects have always been a good thing to add to a portfolio. They’re never the only thing. Not every side project has to be a thing that makes money or has lots of users. It’s okay if it’s personal to you. The most compelling side projects are projects that solve a real problem, where you shipped something and then iterated on it a little bit. It’s not satisfying when people make something that didn’t solve a real problem, it just sounded like a fun idea, they made it in a weekend, and then... nothing.

So I guess that’s why side projects are super useful to have on a portfolio. They’re a way to demonstrate you have more reps in that process. But it’s not the only way. Obviously, in your main job you get lots of reps too. Side projects have always been good — they probably won’t be the main thing. People will still want to see some level of depth and expertise.

— Europe context

You’re in Berlin this week. European teams tend to build under different constraints with GDPR, tighter capital, users with higher privacy expectations. When you look at how product teams here design and build, what do you notice? And if ‘build for Europe first’ had been your starting constraint, what would you have done differently?

BRIAN: Well, there are the legal constraints. But I think a lot of the legal constraints are founded on good ideas, we should take care of people’s data, we should give people control over their data, the ability to delete an account, those kinds of things. So I don’t know that it’s just legally required to ship a product in Europe. It’s a good principle to have for anyone building software.

Everyone I’ve met so far, it’s pretty remarkable, we’re all thinking about the same things and solving the same problems. It’s not like we’re building different kinds of software. We’re all trying to solve real problems for real people, trying to figure out how to incorporate AI. What is this new tool going to change about our process? About the way people want to interact with our tools? About the way tools look? Are we all just going to be chatting with every app in the future? Probably not, but somewhere between that and our current state, it’ll be in the middle.
Everyone is trying to figure out the same things. How do we leverage AI without spending too much money? How do we incorporate the right blend of LLMs, non-deterministic outputs, code, and deterministic outputs? How do we work those things together to automate a process that deserves to be automated, or get insights that were hard to get in the past? These are all pretty universal things. I don’t know if that’s surprising, but it’s been consistent. That’s the cool thing about working at Notion, we get to build for people here and around the world. Most of our users are outside of the US, so this is just baked into how we ship software.

We hope you found Brian’s words as insightful as we did. A big thank you to Brian for his time, and to the teams at Notion and Laika Communications for making the introduction.

— The Ampli Team

Ampli is a media platform and community for the people building, designing, and running Berlin’s tech scene. We curate jobs, events, high-signal reads, and news — and amplify the voices of our community.

What kind of content would you like to see more of? Founder stories, guest posts, education, events, something else entirely? Let us know, we’re at connect@ampli.xyz.

]]><![CDATA[#99: Brian Lovin in Berlin, Working Student roles, Visual AI app and more]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/99-brian-lovin-in-berlin-workinghttps://ampli.substack.com/p/99-brian-lovin-in-berlin-workingMon, 13 Jul 2026 06:01:45 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community.

Last week was busier than usual, as predicted, but we managed to keep up. And this week, we’re even bringing gifts.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s feature: we had some quality time with Brian Lovin, Product Designer building AI products at Notion, to ask him about the designer’s role in tech right now. So make sure to check it out.

Attia Elsayed (Ampli), Brian Lovin (Notion), Monica Leyva (Ampli)

We want you, and/or your bestie ;) Join our team!

This is your reminder that Ampli is growing from a newsletter into a Berlin tech media and community platform around knowledge, events, jobs, builders work and news.

We have two core team roles, and we’d genuinely love to hear from you:

🖋️ Creative & Content Fellow: for someone who likes writing, social content, visuals, event recaps, and the small craft of community storytelling.

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Learn More here

If any of that sounds like you, or like someone you know, spread the word or get in touch.

🚀 The AMPLI Board of Jobs “this week's Top Picks”

The Ampli Board

🤖 Senior ML Ops Engineer, AI Platform Team — GetYourGuide · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior-level MLOps experience with Python, production ML systems, and platform tooling (Spark, GenAI pipelines); you’ve shipped and operated ML infrastructure at scale.

📊 Senior Data Scientist, Consumer Core — Wolt · Senior · Remote
Min. Requirement: Strong Python and SQL, solid statistics and experimentation, and senior experience turning product data into decisions for a consumer-facing platform.

💻 Senior Frontend Engineer — Personio · Senior · Hybrid
Min. Requirement: Senior frontend expertise in TypeScript and React, a strong product mindset, and comfort owning features end-to-end (2 days/week in Berlin or Munich).

⚙️ Senior Software Engineer. Flash — Forto · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior backend experience with TypeScript/Node.js, cloud (AWS/GCP) and Kubernetes; bonus for event-driven systems and applying LLMs to real operational workflows.

👔 Head of Engineering, Platform — Upvest · Leadership · Remote
Min. Requirement: Proven engineering leadership of platform/infrastructure teams, strong architectural judgment, and experience scaling reliable systems in a regulated fintech environment.

🛒 Junior Technical Product Owner. Data — smartclip · Junior · Remote
Min. Requirement: Early-career product/technical background, comfort working with data services and Agile delivery, and an appetite to own outcomes end-to-end.

🎨 Junior Product Designer — DKB Code Factory · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Foundational product-design skills in Figma and FigJam, an eye for clear, accessible UI, and eagerness to grow through mentorship on shipping features.

🚀 DevOps Engineer Embedded Build Platforms — Rohde & Schwarz · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Solid DevOps foundations (Python, Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD and Linux) with an interest in build and test tooling for embedded software.

🎓 Working Student Jobs

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of events!

🖥 High-signal content and news


Germany just produced the largest fusion investment in European history — €411M to build the world’s first commercial stellarator power plant — Munich’s Proxima Fusion (spun out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics) closed a €411M Series A2 at a €2.4B valuation, with Google, RWE, KfW, and Balderton on the cap table. The plan: build Alpha, a net-energy fusion demonstrator, in the early 2030s, then Stellaris, the first commercial stellarator power plant, on the site of a decommissioned nuclear plant in Bavaria.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🇩🇪 Germany · 🔬 Researchers

Eren Bali’s Monogram raises $40M for a visual AI app — DST Global and Lux Capital backed Monogram to build an AI that responds to queries with dynamic, interactive UIs, a recipe request produces a scrollable menu; a travel plan produces a live map, instead of a text blob. Backed by Arthur Mensch (Mistral), Logan Green (Lyft), and Garry Tan. If this pattern holds, the question for product teams shifts from “what does the copy say?” to “what does the interface do?”
ERT: 4–6 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

A French startup just released a free library that runs any open-source LLM on any chip — including Apple Metal and Google TPUs — ZML’s LLMD inference server runs LLMs across Nvidia, AMD, Google TPU, Apple Metal, and Intel Arc, removing the architecture lock-in that forces most teams into Nvidia-only inference stacks. One to watch for any team building multi-cloud or edge inference pipelines. ERT: 5–7 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

The AI revenue flywheel is accelerating, not slowing — TechCrunch tracked the AI startups reporting not just high ARR but accelerating growth rates: each new $100M came faster than the last. Sierra (customer service AI agents): $200M ARR in 9 months. Glean (enterprise AI search): $300M ARR, the $200M–$300M phase took 6 months vs 9 months for the prior tranche. Gusto: $1B in trailing 12-month revenue. The enterprise AI market is genuinely separating into those generating returns and those burning budget.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🚀 Founders

OpenAI published the most practical guide to building production-ready AI agents yet, and it's free — Distilled from hundreds of enterprise deployments, this covers the full arc: identifying high-value use cases, choosing single vs multi-agent architectures, designing guardrails at every stage, and building human-in-the-loop checkpoints. The key principle: start small, validate with real users, never all-or-nothing. A Deutsche Telekom case study published alongside it (July 10) shows what that looks like at scale.
ERT: 20–30 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data · 🎨 Design & PMs

Robotics is about to have its ChatGPT moment — and it won’t come from collecting more data — Pim de Witte (General Intuition, CEO) is betting that the specialised, environment-specific robot models that dominate today will become redundant the same way task-specific NLP models did after GPT-3. The thesis: a foundation model for physical AI that understands space and time generalises across embodiments, removing the need for millions of hours of environment-specific training data.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🔬 Researchers

The clearest framework yet for PMs navigating the agent era: workspace agents vs product agents — Paweł Huryn draws a distinction that cuts through most AI PM content: workspace agents are what you use to do your own work (Claude Code, Cowork, Codex); product agents are what you build and embed in products for users and teams.
ERT: 20–30 min · 🎨 Design & PMs · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

Happy Monday 💜 and see you next week! Subscribe to stay ahead!

Connect with us via: ampli.xyz | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email

Thanks for reading Ampli Berlin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work

]]><![CDATA[#98: WeAreDevelopers week is full of events. Did you get our guide?]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/98-wearedevelopers-week-is-full-ofhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/98-wearedevelopers-week-is-full-ofMon, 06 Jul 2026 06:01:19 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community.

The clouds replaced the intense sun this weekend, and all we wanted was to sit outside. But the rain had other plans when the wind made it feel colder, and the jackets we’d put away had to come back out.

Welcome to our Monday weather hindsight, where we give voice to Berlin’s favorite vanilla topic to complain about.

So let’s get into it.

Builders and developers, Twilio is in town

This is your reminder that the Twilio Assemble is happening in two days and they’re bringing together a select group of local developers and builders for a high-energy half-day experience focused entirely on the future of AI and Communications.

🤝 In partnership with Twilio

With limited spots available this is your chance to explore their newest product suite for the AI landscape and get the inspiration to build next-generation customer experiences.

July 8 · 17:30–23:00 · Design Offices Berlin Humboldthafen

I want a spot

🚀 The AMPLI Board of Jobs “this week's Top Picks”

The Ampli Board

🎨 Staff Product Designer, Mobile — KAYAK · Lead · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Staff-level IC with proven track record leading mobile app design across multiple teams, setting quality bars and UX/UI patterns, and shipping design work yourself.

🤖 Product Manager (AI) — autarc (YC S24) · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Mid-level PM with hands-on experience in AI/LLM products, comfortable running sprints in Linear and shipping prototypes in AI-assisted dev tools.

📊 AI Engineer — DEPT® · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Early-career engineer with Python + ML/AI foundations, comfortable building predictive models and end-to-end AI systems with focus on scalability and observability.

🚀 Founding Software Engineer — Clera · Junior · Remote
Min. Requirement: Early-career engineer strong in TypeScript/Python full-stack with hands-on LLM experience (tool-calling, evals, inference optimization); comfort with startup ambiguity essential.

⚙️ Software Engineer, Distributed Systems & Ownership — idealo internet GmbH · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 5+ years backend experience with distributed systems, event-driven architecture (Kafka), and cloud-native AWS; comfortable with end-to-end service ownership including on-call.

🏎️ Site Reliability Engineer — Sony Interactive Entertainment · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Mid-level SRE with production ownership experience, strong Linux/cloud fundamentals, and comfort influencing architectural decisions for large-scale streaming systems.

📱 Senior iOS Engineer — SoundCloud · Senior · Remote
Min. Requirement: Senior iOS engineer fluent in Swift, familiar with modern Apple platforms (Apple Watch, CarPlay), and experienced shipping consumer apps at scale.

💻 Senior Frontend Engineer (f/m/d) — CYCLE · Senior · Remote
Min. Requirement: Senior frontend engineer strong in React + TypeScript, with architecture experience on B2B/SaaS platforms and comfort setting technical standards across a team.

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of events!

✨BONUS: The week is going to be intense, but we’ll split up and conquer, so you’ll catch us across multiple events ;) don’t miss our unofficial WeAreDevelopers 2026 guide for SideQuests.

🖥 High-signal content and news


Microsoft, AWS, OpenAI, and Anthropic all launched “embed engineers inside customers” businesses in one month — Microsoft Frontier Company launched July 2 with $2.5B and 6,000 engineers. AWS committed $1B two days earlier. The pattern is now industry-wide: impressive AI demos haven’t translated into measurable enterprise results, so the AI providers are sending their own engineers to build inside customer operations.
ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News

The EU AI Act August 2 deadline is 4 weeks away — The EU Council formally adopted the Digital Omnibus on June 29, pushing high-risk AI obligations to December 2027. But August 2 is still the deadline for transparency rules — chatbot disclosure, AI-generated content labeling (watermarking), and GPAI model obligations. For product teams: every AI feature that interacts with EU users needs a disclosure design in place before August. Violations carry fines up to 3% of global revenue.
ERT: 6–8 min · 📰 News · 🎨 Design & PMs

Most AI teams pick the model first and the architecture second — Theory Ventures VC Tomasz Tunguz argues the real decision is the router: a small piece of code that classifies each task and sends it to the cheapest model tier that can handle it. Get it right and 70-80% of agent traffic runs on local models (near-zero cost) or async batch models. Coinbase cut AI spend in half while token usage grew, not with alerts, but with better defaults, routing, and caching. The practical frame: pick your models last.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data · 🚀 Founders

Earlybird just closed its largest-ever fund at €360M — and kept ownership entirely with active partners — Berlin-based Earlybird VC’s Fund VIII is the firm’s biggest fund ever, focused on early-stage pan-European tech. While several European VCs are exploring external ownership or partial sales, Earlybird is explicitly preserving independence by ensuring ownership transfers only to active partners. In a week when EU-Startups mapped the 10 largest European VC closes of 2026 (more on this in the last piece), Earlybird’s approach is a quiet statement about what long-term founder alignment actually looks like.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🚀 Founders

The EU Commission just awarded its Frontier AI Grand Challenge — the winner will build Europe’s sovereign open-source frontier model in all 24 EU languages — The EUROPA consortium won the Commission’s challenge on June 19, tasked with building Europe’s first frontier-class open-source AI model across all 24 official EU languages. The research question it’s trying to answer: can a government-backed consortium produce a genuinely competitive frontier model, or does that require the market incentives of a commercial lab?
ERT: 5–7 min · 🔬 Researchers

A Sentry engineer spent four months and 100K lines of TypeScript building a Slack AI agent — David Cramer (Sentry co-founder) built “Junior”, an open-source intern-in-Slack. The gap between “put an agent in Slack” and a production-ready system is 100K lines of TypeScript and four months of work. Required reading for anyone scoping an AI agent project, and for PMs setting realistic timelines.
ERT: 15–20 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data · 🎨 Design & PMs

Where Europe’s €3.29B in new VC is concentrated — and what that tells you about where to build a career in 2026 — EU-Startups mapped the 10 largest European VC vehicles raised so far in 2026: DeepTech (Kembara €750M first close), DefenceTech, AI, climate, and early-stage software infrastructure dominate. The practical read: the sectors these funds back today are the sectors hiring in 12–18 months.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

Happy Monday 💜 and see you next week! Subscribe to stay ahead!

Connect with us via: ampli.xyz | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email

Thanks for reading Ampli Berlin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work

]]><![CDATA[WeAreDevelopers 2026 Berlin: the unofficial schedule and City Guide]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/wearedevelopers-2026-berlin-the-unofficialhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/wearedevelopers-2026-berlin-the-unofficialMon, 29 Jun 2026 13:03:24 GMT Hey hey 👋

Berlin in July is starts to feel different — long evenings, everyone outside, the canal packed by 6 pm. And next week it gets busier, at least for people in tech ;) WeAreDevelopers World Congress (8–10 July) brings ~15,000 developers, AI builders, and tech leaders to CityCube.

Since we kinda know, we of course wanted to share, so we are bringing you the unofficial guide for the week: side events, meetups, after parties, and some Berlin food spots for the out-of-towners.

If you or someone you know is traveling to Berlin, give this a read and pass it on.

Share

🥂 The Side Events

  • Twilio Assemble: Berlin — Wed 8 Jul. Half-day on AI & Communications (keynote + build session + networking) to open the week. Limited seats. → Register

  • Bitrise Connect — Thu 9 Jul, 6–10 pm. Rooftop dinner, drinks, and a fireside, right after the congress day. → Register

  • European Defense Tech Hackathon — 9–12 Jul, Marienpark. 200+ hackers, Demo Day + after-party on Sunday. → Details

  • Health2Tech Berlin — Tue 7 Jul. Healthtech crowd, ahead of the main days. → Details

dinners & meetups:

🎟️ Inside the congress, don’t sleep on

  • Wed: workshops, masterclasses + warm-up drinks

  • Thu: CODE100 Finals and the official Congress Party (the big one)

  • HR Leaders Summit runs all three days if that’s your lane

  • Full agenda → wearedevelopers.com

🔥 Already in town early?

The week before is stacked too check our Issue 97 events Calendar for the week, for more since GITEX AI Europe (30 Jun–1 Jul, Messe Berlin, ~950 companies + 600 investors), it’s also happening

🥙 Where to eat & caffeinate

The conference is out west, but the food worth crossing town for is central and east. Our picks:

☕️ Coffee

  • Bonanza — third-wave pioneer; cafés across Mitte, Kreuzberg & PBerg. Website

  • Five Elephant — legendary Philadelphia cheesecake; cafés in Kreuzberg, Mitte & PBerg. Website

  • Ben Rahim — Mitte; hidden Tunisian courtyard café.

🥐 Brunch & all-day cafés

💻 Cafés to work from

  • St. Oberholz — Mitte (Rosenthaler Platz); Berlin’s original laptop café / coworking institution.

  • Coffee Circle Café — Mitte; specialty roaster café, comfy for a work session.

  • The Store X — Mitte (Torstraße 1); spacious café-workspace inside Soho House.

🍰 Sweets

  • Zeit für Brot — cinnamon rolls people queue for; in Mitte, PBerg & Charlottenburg. Website

  • Sofi — Mitte; sourdough + pastries in a courtyard.

  • CANAL — Mitte; handmade éclairs and gelato.

  • La Maison — Kreuzberg; French bakery right on the canal.

  • Antep Baklava — proper Gaziantep baklava; several shops citywide. Website

🍦 Ice cream

  • Hokey Pokey — Prenzlauer Berg & Mitte; cult honeycomb-caramel scoops (expect a queue).

  • Jones Ice Cream — Schöneberg; small-batch, the OG scoop shop (also PBerg & Kreuzberg).

🍽️ Eats

  • Rüyam Gemüse Kebab — Schöneberg; a contender for Berlin’s best döner.

  • Mr. Noodle Chen — Wedding; Lanzhou hand-pulled beef noodles.

  • Sarajevo — Wedding; Bosnian bakery-grill (burek + ćevapčići).

  • Casalot — Mitte; Levantine mezze near Hauptbahnhof.

  • Fanous — Steglitz; Persian kebabs & stews.

🌅 Sunset

  • Tempelhofer Feld — the giant former-airport field; bring drinks and watch the sun set over the old runways.

  • Capital Beach — Mitte; beach bar on the Spree by Hauptbahnhof.

  • Mauerpark — Prenzlauer Berg; the hill fills up at sunset (Sunday = flea market + Bearpit Karaoke).

📍 We mapped all of it → open the Ampli Berlin map. Save it to your phone before you land.

💼 Hiring or job-hunting that week?

Half the companies at the congress are recruiting. If you’re in town and looking, our Berlin jobs board is hand-curated and updated weekly — worth a look before you start hitting booths.

Three ways to make this issue count:

  • 📩 Forward it to anyone flying in for WeAreDevelopers.

  • 💬 Reply and tell us what you’re hitting, we read every one, and we might add it to the live guide.

🤝 Come say hi — join the Ampli community and find other builders on the ground.

Want to reach Berlin’s tech crowd?

Ampli is a Berlin tech community and newsletter read by builders, founders, product people, designers, and operators across the city.

If you’re hosting something during Congress week, or planning a meetup, workshop, launch event, hiring push, or community activation later this year — we can help you.

You can work with Ampli to:

  • co-host meetups and workshops

  • sponsor community events and newsletters

  • reach Berlin’s tech talent through our weekly guide

  • connect with builders, founders, and operators already active in the ecosystem

We care about useful, high-signal events — not random promo. If it’s relevant for the Berlin tech community, let’s talk connect@ampli.xyz

See you out there.

— Attia, Ampli’s Founder

P.S. Hosting something during Congress week? Reply, and we’ll add it to the guide — it’s getting shared with everyone coming to town.

]]><![CDATA[#97: Twilio in town, WeAreDevelopers sidequests, German startups moves + more]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/97-twilio-in-town-wearedevelopershttps://ampli.substack.com/p/97-twilio-in-town-wearedevelopersMon, 29 Jun 2026 06:21:45 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community.

We have to be honest, we have no idea what was cool in Berlin this weekend because we barely left the house with these temperatures, but we do know what’s coming ;) Congrats to the people out there existing, to the ones running we hope you’re still alive, and whoever survived the ice cream line: you earned it.

So let’s get into it.

Twilio Assemble for developers

🤝 In partnership with Twilio

Raise your hand if you’re building anything that communicates: whether it's SMS, voice, email, an AI agent, then you already know who Twilio is.

They’ll be in town on July 8 hosting an Assemble specially put together to gather builders and developers to meet the Twilio team over food and drinks, test-drive their newest AI tools, and come together as a community in the city. A great chance to meet other builders, swap ideas, and make new connections.

July 8 · 19:30–23:00 · Design Offices Berlin Humboldthafen.

Spots are limited so grab yours while they’re still available.

I want a spot

If you haven’t worked with Twilio yet, you’ve definitely used something built on top of them, their platform powers the messaging and communications layer of some of the most-used products out there. They’ll also be in Berlin as part of WeAreDevelopers Congress if you want to catch them there as well ;)

🚀 The AMPLI Board of Jobs “this week's Top Picks”

The Ampli Board

⚙️ Backend Engineer - Payments — N26 · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Software experience in a JVM language (Kotlin a plus) with Spring Boot, comfort with microservices on AWS, and working knowledge of Postgres.

🛒 Product Manager (Hands-on & Execution) — NEWWORK Software · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Early PM experience with strong delivery instincts, comfort building inside AI-assisted tooling (Cursor or similar), and a hands-on, ship-it bias over spec-writing.

📱 Mobile Engineer - Android (m/w/d) — PAYBACK · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Strong Android + Kotlin, disciplined testing habits (unit, Espresso, manual), and comfort working agile with PMs, QA, and UX in tight loops.

🤖 Agentic AI Engineer (m/f/d) — Mercanis · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Solid Python, hands-on experience building agentic systems with LangGraph (or equivalent), LLM provider integration know-how, and AWS deployment fluency.

🎨 Product Designer (Platform) — Revolut · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior product design experience on complex platform or internal-tooling surfaces, strong systems thinking, and a track record turning fragmented workflows into structured products.

💰 Senior Machine Learning Engineer II — SumUp · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior ML engineer with production deployment experience, deep MLOps tooling instincts, and hands-on familiarity with modern LLM stacks.

🚀 (Junior) Cloud Engineer (m/f/d) — HomeToGo · Junior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Familiarity with AWS or GCP, hands-on IaC with Terraform / OpenTofu, exposure to cloud networking (VPC, VPN), and comfort owning long-running migrations.

💻 Senior Frontend Developer (all genders) — Lightspeed Commerce · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior frontend experience with modern React + TypeScript, fluency shipping production web apps for enterprise users, and ownership instincts across the full stack.

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of events!

✨BONUS: First week of July is coming strong! We are developers is definitely bringing a lot of collateral events and as we might have hinted at the beginning you’ll find us with our partners at the Twilio Assemble on July 8.

🖥 High-signal content and news


The US government just gate-kept a frontier AI model — Following the Anthropic Fable 5/Mythos ban two weeks ago, the Trump administration asked OpenAI to limit GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna) to government-approved customers before public release — the first time Washington has preemptively restricted a frontier model launch. For European teams: the era when AI capabilities arrived as consumer product drops is ending. Frontier models are becoming regulated infrastructure.
ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News

OpenAI built its first custom AI chip with Broadcom in nine months — Jalapeño is an inference-only ASIC designed from scratch around OpenAI’s LLM workloads, reaching tape-out in the fastest high-performance chip development cycle ever claimed. Early testing shows substantially better performance per watt than current GPUs. The broader signal: Google, Amazon, Apple, and now OpenAI all building custom silicon is structural Nvidia derisking, not just cost optimisation.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

VARM raises €17.5M to solve Germany’s climate bottleneck — not with better tech, but with more trained people — Germany has 14 million poorly insulated homes and not enough skilled workers to fix them. Berlin-based VARM trains career changers from logistics and retail to become certified insulation specialists in two weeks, then deploys them via a franchise model that completes a single-family home in one day at a fixed €5K price. ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund and GET Fund (the team behind sonnen’s exit to Shell) led the Series A. ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

Almetra — formerly Deltia — raised €16M to put AI cameras above factory floors at Bosch, Siemens Energy, and ABB — The Berlin company mounts cameras above assembly lines and converts video into live production data — cycle times, output rates, micro-stoppages — without requiring IT integration. Customers report 15–20% productivity gains. Almetra has been accepted into Google DeepMind’s Robotics Accelerator and NVIDIA’s Physical AI Fellowship, meaning its factory video feeds are being positioned as training data for next-generation industrial robots, not just a productivity dashboard.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

FINN just became Germany’s newest unicorn — by betting Europeans would stop buying cars — Munich-based FINN raised €140M in Series D (€100M equity led by Portage + €40M debt) to hit a €1B+ valuation, seven years after founding. CEO Maximilian Wühr, 31, told Sifted the fundraising process was “easier than previous rounds”, a sign that the car subscription thesis is now considered proven, even as investors concentrated capital on AI and defence. A rare profitable consumer hardware-adjacent unicorn in Germany’s mostly B2B ecosystem.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🚀 Founders

a16z just backed a startup trying to make AI achieve 99.99% accuracy — by treating hallucinations like engineering bugs — Probably raised $9M from a16z to build formal verification for AI outputs — catching factual errors and hallucinations before they reach the user, targeting the same error-rate standard (99.99% uptime) that deterministic software systems achieve.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🔬 Researchers

One of Europe’s most prominent VC investors is joining a Berlin AI startup as co-CEO — Judith Dada (General Partner at Visionaries, ex-La Famiglia) is joining Berlin’s Langdock as co-CEO from September, while remaining a senior partner at the fund. The move is notable both for the company and the pattern: senior European VCs stepping directly into operator roles at their portfolio companies is a new, still-rare signal of conviction.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 📰 News

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]]><![CDATA[#96: “tokenmaxxing” collapse, Summer Gathering, AI Startups Residency + more]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/96-tokenmaxxing-collapse-summer-gatheringhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/96-tokenmaxxing-collapse-summer-gatheringMon, 22 Jun 2026 07:13:43 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community.

How were your weather management skills this weekend? Talking adaptability and fast-changing environments, did you melt in the heat, get soaked in the rain, swim in the lake, or submit to the power of the music?

Whatever it was, we hope your weekend was a good one.

Ampli’s Summer Gathering Recap

Ampli’s 2026 Summer Gathering was a total success and we didn’t want to let it pass without sharing something important and our biggest takeaways from that evening. Words that our team believe and many of the leaders that gathered that evening shared with us: however hard it might seem sometimes, we have each other. And we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the people we surround ourselves with, to bring out our best, to keep us optimistic, and to remind us what we’re capable of.

Come work with us!

From us to you: We're so grateful that you're here. Whatever the second half of the year asks of you, we hope you meet it with people who get it, the kind of curiosity that keeps you going, and the occasional reminder that you're not doing it alone. Thanks for reading."

🚀 The AMPLI Board of Jobs “this week's Top Picks”

The Ampli Board

🎨 Lead Product Designer — JustPlay · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior product or game design experience (first design-lead role welcome), proven gamification + engagement design portfolio, and a data-informed, player-centric instinct.

📊 Data Scientist — Kaufland e-commerce · Junior · Berlin (Remote)
Min. Requirement: BSc/MSc in DS/Stats/ML, fluency in Python + SQL with strong production instincts, end-to-end ownership from prototype to production, and a domain interest in marketing or multi-channel attribution.

🛒 Senior Product Manager (Enterprise) — n8n · Senior · Berlin (Remote)
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs PM on infra / dev-tools / B2B SaaS, deep instincts for enterprise security, SSO and admin, and a track record shaping roadmaps with engineers and design partners.

💻 Senior Frontend Engineer — Helsing · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs production frontend with TypeScript + React, fluency around state, performance and real-time UI, plus willingness to clear a defence-grade security background check.

⚙️ Staff Engineer — Numa · Lead · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 8+ yrs backend with deep expertise in distributed systems at scale, proven mentorship + cross-team architecture leadership, and comfort owning the trade-offs of a fast, vertically-integrated product.

🚀 Senior DevOps Engineer — Kittl · Senior · Berlin (Remote)
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs DevOps/SRE running production AWS/GCP at scale, deep Kubernetes / Terraform / CI-CD expertise, and comfort owning platform reliability + cost across a high-traffic AI product.

📱 Senior Mobile Engineer (Food Tracking) — Yazio · Senior · Berlin (Remote)
Min. Requirement: Senior mobile engineer with deep Android + Kotlin (Compose, ideally KMP), comfort owning features end-to-end and shipping AI-powered consumer flows; iOS/Swift welcome. Fully remote across DE / ES / PT / UK.

🤖 Software Engineer - Fullstack(m/f/d) — Reonic · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 3+ yrs full-stack with TypeScript + React/Next.js + Node/Postgres, ability to own complex features end-to-end, and motivation to ship in a fast, ownership-heavy renewables-tech team.

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of events!

✨BONUS: Summer is when we all get extra picky with how we spend our time, and it’s hard to decide if we’re locked in or letting go. Our team is still in the locked-in mindset, so we’d pay special attention to “High-Risk HR: Preparing Your People Team for the EU AI Act” on June 23. But ask us again mid-July, and we’d probably be choosing rooftop drinks instead.

OjinAixHaus: Startups Callout

Residences at Ojin AixHaus are opening for AI startups: a home in Berlin Mitte for teams who want a base to build from. The space is filled with builders at different stages and working on different problems and stacks, and that variety is the point. The person next to you may have already encountered the issue you are about to face, developed the necessary tool, or know exactly who you should talk to.

Building something in AI and want a base in Berlin? Reach out at the link below.

📍 Ojin AixHaus, Chausseestraße, Berlin Mitte
🎟 https://ojin.ai/community

🖥 High-signal content and news


The “tokenmaxxing” era just collapsed — Uber, Microsoft, and Amazon are all pulling back — Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Microsoft cancelled Claude Code licenses for entire product divisions due to cost. One unnamed enterprise reportedly spent $500M on Claude in a single month after forgetting to set usage limits. The culture that defined 2025 is officially over, and what replaces it is an ROI-first era where every AI line item needs to justify itself.
ERT: 6–8 min · 📰 News

A new market is forming around managing AI’s runaway costs — As companies scramble to understand where their AI spend is actually going, a wave of startups, vendors, and a new standards body (the Tokenomics Foundation) are racing to build the tooling and shared language this market currently lacks. There’s no canonical definition yet for what a “token” costs, what it produces, or how to compare spend across providers, which means whoever builds the FinOps-for-AI category first has a real moat.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🚀 Founders

Berlin’s Seqana raises €3.2M to turn soil health into a measurable, financial risk metric — Seqana uses satellite imagery and machine learning to quantify soil carbon and health at scale, working with Danone, Bayer, and carbon project developers across millions of hectares. The new round extends the company beyond carbon credits into a broader supply-chain risk product.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin

Figma’s design agent can now search the web — closing the placeholder-content gap. As of June 18, Figma’s AI agent can pull live web context directly into a design file, real product names, real copy, and real reference images, instead of forcing designers to swap out Lorem Ipsum and stock photos later.
ERT: 3–5 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

Entry-level tech hiring contracted hard in 2026 — but it didn’t disappear, it moved. 148,092 tech workers have been displaced this year at a pace of 981/day, and software developer employment for ages 22–25 is down nearly 20% since 2024. But ML engineer postings are up 59% above pre-pandemic levels, cybersecurity postings are up 124%, and IBM just tripled its US entry-level hiring after rewriting junior job descriptions around AI-augmented work instead of boilerplate coding.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

Berlin’s INXM emerges from stealth with €5.7M to fix why enterprise AI projects fail. INXM’s founding team, former chief digital officers of Isar Aerospace and Volocopter, alongside n8n and Thoughtworks veterans, built an “AI Process Execution Engine” that generates deterministic, auditable workflow code instead of years of brittle implementation.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

Happy Monday 💜 and see you next week! Subscribe to stay ahead!

Connect with us via: ampli.xyz | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email

Thanks for reading Ampli Berlin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work

]]><![CDATA[#95: World Cup viewing event, German robots and Anthropic's model shutdown + more]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/95-world-cup-viewing-event-germanhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/95-world-cup-viewing-event-germanMon, 15 Jun 2026 07:02:22 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community. Are you caught up in the World Cup fever, or is it just your friends, neighbours, family and social media algorithms?

In any case, if you need a small-talk topic this week (beyond the crazy weather swings we had over the weekend), Germany beat Curaçao 7-1 yesterday. Disclaimer: only useful if your conversation partner actually cheers for Germany. Otherwise, change the subject quickly.

Okay, enough warming up and let’s get to the good stuff.

Women+ in Automation x Ampli

​For the very first time, Women+ in Automation is partnering with Ampli for a hands-on automation workshop and community evening for women+ in tech.

​Women+ in Automation is the Berlin-based community by n8n, creating a welcoming space where women+ can learn automation through hands-on workshops, peer support, and real community.

If you are a woman+ in teach looking to optimise some of your daily tasks this is gonna be the perfect gathering for you.

Where can I join?

This event is designed for people who enjoy playing with tools, APIs, and workflows, even if they're new to automation platforms like n8n. No prior n8n experience needed, but a basic familiarity with technical concepts will help you get the most out of the workshop

🚀 The AMPLI Board of jobs “this week's Top Picks”

The Ampli Board

🎨 Senior Product Designer (B2C) — GetYourGuide · Senior · Berlin (Hybrid)
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs senior product design experience for consumer web/apps, comfort with research-driven decisions, and a portfolio showing strong systems thinking around conversion-critical flows.

💰 Junior Product Manager:in (w/m/d) — Enpal · Junior · Berlin (Hybrid)
Min. Requirement: First PM experience or strong analytics/tech-consulting background, fluent German + English, and curiosity for hardware/clean-tech go-to-market operations.

📊 Applied Scientist — B2B Data Science and Algorithms — Zalando · Junior
Min. Requirement: MSc/PhD in CS/ML/OR with applied modeling experience, strong Python + ML toolkit (PyTorch/scikit-learn), and a track record shipping ML systems into production.

🤖 Machine Learning Engineer — Just Eat Takeaway.com · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 3+ yrs ML engineering with Python, hands-on with cloud ML (AWS/GCP) + Docker/Kubernetes/Airflow, and experience taking models from notebook to production.

⚙️ Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Berlin) — Cresta · Senior · Berlin (Remote)
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs backend with strong Python, deep experience designing distributed data systems on PostgreSQL/REST APIs, and exposure to ML-adjacent platforms.

💻 Senior Frontend Engineer (m/w/d) — Octopus Energy · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs frontend with deep TypeScript + Next.js (Remix/Vue welcome), strong fundamentals around SSR/server components and scalable architectures, and product-ownership instincts.

📱 Senior Design System Engineer — Bolt · Senior · Berlin (Hybrid)
Min. Requirement: Strong frontend foundations with deep design-systems experience, fluency across web + mobile platforms (React Native, native iOS/Android), and instincts for cross-functional design collaboration.

👔 Senior Engineering Manager — Free2move · Lead · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs engineering leadership, strong agile/distributed-systems background, and a track record driving large technical transformations at scale.

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of events!

✨BONUS: If you ask us, you’ll know where we’ll be on Monday 22 June. But other than that, we recommend keeping an eye on the World Cup Viewing Series at The Delta. Today, Monday 15 June, there’s Spain vs Cape Verde at 18:00 and Belgium vs Egypt at 21:00.

🖥 High-signal content and news


The US government banned foreign access to Anthropic's two newest models, so Anthropic shut them down for everyone — On Friday June 13, Secretary of Commerce ordered Anthropic to immediately suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals, including foreign-national Anthropic employees, citing national security concerns flagged by Amazon CEO. Because the directive made partial compliance impossible, Anthropic disabled both models entirely for all users globally. The models had launched three days earlier. For European teams building on Anthropic's stack: this is a live reminder that US export controls can override access with no warning, and the Anthropic–White House tension is far from resolved.
ERT: 6–8 min · 📰 News

Berlin's Merantix Capital closes €103M to back AI-native founders. Half the fund goes to startups before they even have a product — Merantix Capital's new fund is split 50/50: half backs founders working directly with the team at the Merantix AI Campus from the "pre-idea" stage; half goes to pre-seed and seed companies across Europe. Strategic LPs include Jungheinrich, Union Investment, and KPMG Germany — who aren't just writing cheques but providing early customers and pilot projects. The thesis: AI's value is in embedding it inside specific industries, not in building another horizontal model.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🚀 Founders

The EU AI Act enforcement date is now 7 weeks away — and most companies are not ready — August 2, 2026 marks full enforcement for high-risk AI systems across hiring, credit scoring, biometrics, and education access, with fines up to 7% of global revenue. The compliance window is effectively closed for companies that haven't already mapped their AI systems and started conformity assessments. For product teams: the risk register for AI features just became a legal document.
ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News · PMs

Half of designers have now shipped AI-generated code to production — The Designer Fund x Foundation Capital AI in Design 2026 report (900+ designers, 60+ countries) finds that prototypes are replacing mockups as the primary design output, and the most surprising shift is leadership: senior designers and design managers are shipping AI-generated code faster than their ICs. Case studies from Anthropic, Linear, Notion, Shopify, Stripe, and Framer make this one of the most grounded design reports of the year.
ERT: 10–15 min · 🎨 Design & PMs · 🔬 Researchers

Germany just produced the largest robotics funding round in history — NEURA Robotics closes $1.4B with Nvidia, Amazon, Bosch, and Qualcomm — Metzingen-based NEURA Robotics closed a $1.4B Series C at a $7B valuation, the largest round ever for a full-stack robotics company. The cap table is the story: Nvidia, Amazon, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, and the European Investment Bank in one syndicate maps almost exactly onto the supply chain a humanoid robotics business needs to exist.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🇩🇪 Germany · 📰 News

AI Product Design: The Complete Guide to Tools, Workflows, Skills, and Real-World Challenges — As AI systems move from answering questions to taking actions on your behalf, the design patterns that create user trust are completely different. Eleken breaks down six patterns from real products ( Intercom, Salesforce Agentforce, Google Jules) covering approval gates, confidence signals, undo architectures, and how to surface what the agent decided without drowning the user in logs. Practical and directly applicable.
ERT: 8–10 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

Happy Monday 💜 and see you next week! Subscribe to stay ahead!

Connect with us via: ampli.xyz | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email

Thanks for reading Ampli Berlin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work

]]><![CDATA[#94: Jobs at Raisin, Bettermile, Vestiaire, Tibber + more]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/94-jobs-at-raisin-bettermile-vestiairehttps://ampli.substack.com/p/94-jobs-at-raisin-bettermile-vestiaireMon, 08 Jun 2026 07:01:56 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community. How was your water intake this weekend? Even with the occasional raindrops and grey skies, it felt dry over here. Let's start the week right: drink some water. And no, your morning coffee doesn't count.

Have you come across Rareform?

If Ampli covers what’s happening in Berlin tech, Rareform covers something just as important: how the rest of your life is going. It’s a weekly newsletter about moving, walking, and living well in this city, and we’ve quietly become big fans.

Every Monday, they put together health and wellness events, walking guides and top picks across the city. Twice a month, their In Conversation series features the practitioners and thinkers behind Berlin’s wellness bubble.

Whether you are job searching or job hustling, stepping away to move your body isn’t time lost. It’s time that brings you back sharper.

Your healthy life, woven into daily rhythms.

🚀 “The AMPLI Board” of jobs

This week’s hiring picks are live. Head over to the job board and have a look!
Spot something off on the board? Missing a feature? Have a brilliant idea? Tell us. Let’s build this together. 💬

The Ampli Board

✨ This week's Top Picks

🛒 Product Manager — US B2C Experience — Raisin · Junior · Berlin
The Berlin savings-and-investment marketplace is opening up a junior PM seat on the US B2C experience s
Min. Requirement: 1–2 yrs PM or analytical product role, comfort with GraphQL and agile delivery, and an interest in B2C savings/banking journeys.

🎨 Product Designer — Enterprise Software & Design System — EIDU · Mid-Level · Berlin (Hybrid)
The Berlin edtech nonprofit is hiring a mid-level designer to own the enterprise dashboards and design system that teachers and ministries use every day.
Min. Requirement: 3+ yrs product design across complex web apps, hands-on Figma + design-system experience, and a portfolio that shows clarity on dense data UI.

📱 Senior Software Engineer — Mobile/Android — Flix · Senior · Berlin (Remote)
The mobility giant behind FlixBus and FlixTrain is hiring a Senior Android engineer for the consumer app that powers the largest intercity bus network in Europe.
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs Android with Kotlin, deep experience with GraphQL + REST in production, and a track record shipping consumer-grade apps at scale.

📊 Senior Data Scientist — Better Places — Bettermile · Senior · Berlin (Remote)
The DHL-backed Berlin team optimising last-mile delivery for billions of parcels a year is hiring a Senior DS for “Better Places”, a geospatial models that decide where every delivery truck actually stops.
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs DS with strong Python, hands-on with AWS + Snowflake + dbt, and a portfolio of production geo/optimisation models shipped at scale.

🤖 Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer — Vestiaire Collective · Lead · Berlin
The Paris-and-Berlin pre-loved fashion marketplace is hiring a Staff ML engineer to lead recommendations, pricing, and search ranking across their catalogue.
Min. Requirement: 7+ yrs ML engineering, deep PyTorch + AWS/GCP + Kubernetes, and a track record leading ranking, recommender, or pricing systems in marketplaces.

⚙️ Backend Engineer (Go/Rust) — Xata.io · Mid-Level · Berlin (Remote)
The serverless Postgres platform (acquired by Pulumi) is hiring a mid-level backend engineer to build the developer-tooling core in Go and Rust.
Min. Requirement: 3+ yrs backend engineering in Go or Rust, hands-on Postgres internals + Kubernetes/Docker, and a real interest in developer tools and databases.

💻 Frontend Engineer (Vue.js)— Atolls · Senior · Berlin (Remote)
The Berlin venture builder behind a portfolio of consumer apps is hiring a Senior Vue.js engineer to lead the new web stack.
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs frontend with Vue.js + TypeScript, hands-on GraphQL in production, and a portfolio of consumer web products shipped at scale.

⚡ Senior Fullstack Engineer — Tibber · Senior · Berlin
The Norwegian-born green-energy unicorn is hiring a Senior Fullstack engineer to build the consumer app that tells households when to charge, heat, and run their appliances.
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs full-stack with TypeScript + React + Next.js, hands-on AWS + Kubernetes in production, and an interest in climate-tech / energy markets.

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of buzzing events!

🖥 High-signal content and news

Nielsen Norman Group: UI is no longer a differentiator — and that changes everything about what design is for — NN/g’s annual State of UX report argues that as AI tools let anyone produce a decent-looking interface, the real value of design shifts to knowing what to build and why. Worth reading for the career framing alone.
ERT: 8–10 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

Anthropic is using Claude Mythos to find critical software vulnerabilities. Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s joint industry initiative for AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, is expanding from 50 to ~200 partner organisations globally. Mythos has already identified thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities over several weeks, and Anthropic says a Mythos-class model will be available to all customers within weeks. For security and engineering teams: this changes what “automated vulnerability scanning” means at the architecture level.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

91% of designers now use AI — up from roughly half last year. — The AI in Design 2026 report (Designer Fund x Foundation Capital) finds that three out of four designers now use AI daily, and the old boundaries between designer, prototyper, frontend developer, and researcher are actively blurring. The most striking finding: nobody fully agrees on the “correct” workflow anymore, and the report suggests that adaptability itself is becoming the core design competency.
ERT: 7–10 min · 🎨 Design & PMs · 🔬 Researchers

A Stanford startup just out-forecast the European supercomputer network — WindBorne Systems released WeatherMesh-6, which it claims outperforms ECMWF, the European intergovernmental body considered the world’s gold standard in weather prediction. The five-day forecast is now as accurate as ECMWF’s one-day forecast. Their proprietary sensor data (400-balloon fleet) is the real moat, not model architecture.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🔬 Researchers

Germany tech funding is down 20.7% year-over-year in 2026 — €4.04B has been deployed across 188 rounds in Germany through June 2026, down from €5.1B across 276 rounds in the same period last year. The number of rounds dropped more steeply than the capital, meaning fewer but larger bets. Berlin still holds 26 of Germany’s 48 unicorns.
ERT: 4–5 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🚀 Founders

Sesame just launched an iOS app where your AI has a name, a voice, a point of view and remembers you — The Oculus co-founders built four distinct AI agents with persistent memory, individual personality, and a conversational style designed to avoid the clinical Q&A loop of most AI apps. For product designers and PMs: this is the first consumer AI product in 2026 that treats personality architecture as a core design decision, not a feature. How you shape an AI’s “self” is now a UX problem.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

AI is restructuring companies, not just automating tasks — The pattern is consistent across ClickUp, Oracle, Meta, and GitLab this year: companies cut headcount while reporting record revenue. Gartner data suggests 80% of companies doing this aren’t seeing meaningful returns. The clearest advice: build visible fluency in turning goals into automated workflows, not just using AI tools. ERT: 6–8 min · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

Happy Monday 💜 and see you next week! Subscribe to stay ahead!

Connect with us via: ampli.xyz | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email

Thanks for reading Ampli Berlin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work

]]><![CDATA[#93: Jobs at Databricks, Personio, Doctolib, JetBrains + more]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/93-jobs-at-databricks-personio-doctolibhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/93-jobs-at-databricks-personio-doctolibMon, 01 Jun 2026 07:02:26 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community, hope you caught some of that breeze this weekend. Let's get into it.

We're growing the team

Ampli is growing from a newsletter into a Berlin tech media and community platform around jobs, events, builders, and practical AI. We're not stopping there, and we'd love some good company for what comes next.

We’re opening two core team roles, and we’d genuinely love to hear from you:

Learn More here

🖋️ Creative & Content Fellow: for someone who likes writing, social content, visuals, event recaps, and the small craft of community storytelling.

🤝 Events & Partnerships Fellow: for someone who likes people, partnerships, speakers, venues, Luma pages, and the actual choreography of making Berlin events happen.

If any of that sounds like you, or like someone you know, spread the word or get in touch. We’re a small team, so we are reading you.

🚀 “The AMPLI Board” of jobs

This week’s hiring picks are live. Head over to the job board and have a look!
Spot something off on the board? Missing a feature? Have a brilliant idea? Tell us. Let’s build this together. 💬

The Ampli Board

✨ This week's Top Picks

  • ⚙️ Senior Software Engineer. Backend — Databricks · Senior · Berlin
    The data and AI platform behind some of the world’s largest enterprises, you’ll build core backend systems that power data engineering and ML workloads.
    Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs backend with strong Java/Scala, deep experience with distributed systems on AWS/Azure, and exposure to big-data stacks like Spark or SQL engines.

  • 🤖 Senior ML Engineer (JetBrains Research) — JetBrains · Senior · Berlin
    The team behind IntelliJ AI Assistant and the new wave of AI features, embedding LLMs deep into the world’s most-loved coding tools.
    Min. Requirement: Strong Python + Kotlin, hands-on with NLP / LLM model training and deployment, and a track record of shipping ML products at scale.

  • 🚀 Staff Site Reliability Engineer — Personio · Lead · Berlin (Remote)
    Min. Requirement: 8+ yrs platform/SRE work, deep AWS + Kubernetes + CI/CD expertise, and a track record building observability and reliability for high-traffic SaaS.

  • 📱 Senior iOS Engineer. SuperApp — SumUp · Senior · Berlin
    Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs iOS engineering with Swift, strong SwiftUI/UIKit + modern Combine/async patterns, and a portfolio of consumer-grade iOS products shipped at scale.

  • 👔 Engineering Manager, Computing Platform — Wolt · Lead · Berlin
    The Helsinki-born delivery giant (DoorDash subsidiary, 27 countries, 80M+ users) is hiring an EM for its Computing Platform.
    Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs engineering leadership, deep platform/infra background (Kubernetes, cloud compute, multi-tenant systems), and experience growing senior IC teams.

  • 💰 Product Manager. Payments & Fintech — Delivery Hero · Lead · Berlin (Hybrid)
    Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs PM experience in fintech or payments, strong technical depth around card networks/PSPs, and a track record launching regulated financial products at scale.

  • 📊 Principal Machine Learning Engineer. Applied AI & LLMs — Doctolib · Lead · Berlin (Remote)
    Min. Requirement: 8+ yrs ML engineering with Python and PyTorch, hands-on LLM productionization experience, and a track record shipping ML products in regulated environments.

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of buzzing events!

🖥 High-signal content and news

Cognition raised $1B at $26B — and Devin is already writing 89% of its own engineers’ code — Cognition (makers of Devin, the autonomous AI software engineer) closed a $1B+ Series D at a $26B valuation, more than double its September 2025 value. With 89% of code committed by Cognition’s own engineers is now written by Devin. Mercedes-Benz, Goldman Sachs, and the US military are all customers.
ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

ClickUp cut 22% of its workforce, deployed 3,000 AI agents, and is now offering $1M salaries to who stays — CEO Zeb Evans framed the 290-person layoff not as cost-cutting but as a structural bet: ClickUp now runs at a 3:1 agent-to-employee ratio, and the savings are being redirected into $1M cash salary bands for employees who generate “100x impact” through AI. Gartner data suggests 80% of companies doing this aren’t seeing meaningful financial returns, but ClickUp says its productivity gains are real and measurable.
ERT: 6–8 min · 📰 News · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

SPREAD AI raised $30M from In-Q-Tel, Salesforce, and DTCP to build engineering intelligence for industrial manufacturers — Berlin-based SPREAD AI connects the fragmented product data trapped across legacy PLM, CAD, and ERP systems into unified “product twins”, giving engineering and operations teams a real-time view of complex products. The cap table tells you something: In-Q-Tel (the US intelligence community’s VC) joining alongside Salesforce means this is defence-adjacent industrial AI, not just factory software.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

The AI coding market just added another $1B+ round — here’s what the Cognition numbers mean for everyone building on top of agents — With Cognition at $26B, Cursor in talks at $50B, and Factory at $1.5B, the autonomous coding agent category is consolidating fast. The structural question for founders and engineers: as these tools get better, the value shifts from writing code to defining what gets built and why, which is a product and systems design skill, not a programming one.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🚀 Founders · 🎨 Design & PMs

The case for building with less: a researcher’s argument that most AI products are over-engineered — A sharp piece making the rounds in research and engineering circles arguing that the AI products shipping fastest in 2026 are the ones built with the fewest moving parts, and that the industry’s instinct to layer agents, RAG pipelines, and fine-tuning on top of each other is producing fragile systems that fail in unpredictable ways.
ERT: 8–10 min · 🔬 Researchers · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

Sesame, from the Oculus founders, just launched its iOS app — and conversational AI finally feels like a real product — Sesame’s four AI agents (Maya, Miles, Simone, Charlie) each carry distinct voices, personalities, and persistent memory across conversations, a deliberate departure from the stateless chatbot model. Founded by Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov (co-founders of Oculus, which sold to Meta for $2B), this is the first conversational AI launch this year that’s been described as genuinely different rather than incrementally better.
ERT: 4–6 min · 📰 News

Germany’s Helsing is raising €1.2B at an €18B valuation — making it the country’s most valuable startup — Defence AI company Helsing, which builds AI systems for fighter jets, submarines, and ground vehicles across NATO militaries, is raising €1.2B led by Dragoneer and Lightspeed, a round that would push it well past SAP-backed Prior Labs and n8n in Germany’s startup valuation rankings. The signal: European institutional capital that was previously cautious on defence is now actively seeking it.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🚀 Founders

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]]><![CDATA[#92: Jobs at JetBrains, Qonto, Doctolib, SumUp + more]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/92-jobs-at-jetbrains-qonto-doctolibhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/92-jobs-at-jetbrains-qonto-doctolibTue, 26 May 2026 07:02:40 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community. Long weekend's done, Tuesday's pretending to be Monday, and we've got a full issue to ease you back in. Let's get into it.

Have you heard of Lou?

Lou is Ojin’s new resident devil. He's also The Human AI Agent, the first one to hold a real-time conversation, built on Ojin's three new models: Oris Portrait, Oris Presence, and Oris Voice. You can talk to him in your browser, back and forth, with comic opinions, surprises, and timing that doesn't feel rehearsed. He's the public demo of what Ojin's generative AI platform makes possible.

If you want to give it a try, just TALK TO LOU

🚀 “The AMPLI Board” of jobs

This week’s hiring picks are live. Head over to the job board and have a look!

The Ampli Board

Spot something off on the board? Missing a feature? Have a brilliant idea? Tell us. Let’s build this together. 💬

✨ This week's Top Picks

  • ⚙️ (Senior) Backend Engineer — lemon.markets · Senior · Berlin
    Brokerage-as-a-Service for European fintechs, a single API that abstracts away the complexity of capital markets so banks, neobrokers, and wealth managers can ship investment products fast.
    Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs backend experience with Python or Go, strong PostgreSQL + REST API design, and comfort with AWS/GCP cloud infrastructure.

  • 💻 Software Engineer — Frontend Autonomous Air System V&V — Helsing · Senior · Berlin Defence
    AI company building autonomous systems, you’ll build the UIs that engineers use to validate and verify mission-critical autonomous air system models.
    Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs with React/Next.js + TypeScript, experience with complex data viz or simulation tooling, and interest in defence / safety-critical software.

  • 📊 Senior Data Scientist (f/m/x) — AUTO1 Group · Senior · Berlin
    Europe’s leading digital automotive platform, you’ll build ML models that optimise the largest used-car marketplace on the continent.
    Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs in Data Science with strong Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, production ML deployment on AWS/GCP, and a track record shipping models at scale.

  • 🤖 Senior Machine Learning Engineer (IntelliJ AI) — JetBrains · Senior · Berlin
    The team behind the AI features that millions of developers now use inside IntelliJ IDEs, embedding LLMs deep into the world’s most-loved coding tools.
    Min. Requirement: Strong Python + Kotlin, hands-on with LLMs and model deployment, and experience taking ML products from prototype to production at scale.

  • 🚀 Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Platform) — Qonto · Lead · Berlin
    Europe’s leading finance workspace for SMEs, 600K+ businesses, 4.8 Trustpilot from 55K+ reviews, and a fast-scaling platform.
    Min. Requirement: 8+ yrs platform/SRE work, deep AWS or GCP + Kubernetes + Terraform expertise, and a track record building observability with Prometheus/Grafana.

  • 📱 Senior Android Engineer — Mobile Platform — SumUp · Senior · Berlin Powering payments for millions of small businesses worldwide, you’ll be shaping how SumUp’s mobile stack scales.
    Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs Android with Kotlin, strong CI/CD + tooling background, and prior experience building platform/SDK code consumed by other teams.

  • 👔 Engineering Manager — AI — Doctolib · Lead · Berlin (Remote)
    Doctolib is digitising European healthcare; you’ll lead the AI engineering team building the next-gen features that make doctors’ and patients’ lives easier.
    Min. Requirement: 3+ yrs leading engineering teams, hands-on background with Python/Java + ML/LLM systems, and experience shipping production AI products in regulated environments.

  • 💰 Product Manager — Lending — N26 · Lead · Berlin (Remote)
    The mobile bank (10M+ customers across 24 markets) is building out its lending vertical; you’ll own the roadmap for credit products that millions of N26 users will rely on.
    Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs PM experience in fintech or lending, strong technical depth around APIs and risk/credit systems, and a track record launching regulated financial products.

Share with a friend

📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of buzzing events!

🖥 High-signal content and news

Google just killed the ten blue links — At I/O on May 19, Google announced its biggest Search redesign in 25 years: an “intelligent search box” that accepts text, images, files, and voice, dispatches background “information agents” to monitor the web for you, and builds custom mini-apps on the fly instead of returning a list of links. AI Mode already has 1 billion monthly users, and Gemini 3.5 Flash is the new default.
ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News

The interface is no longer designed — it’s generated. Here’s what that means for PMs. — The least-discussed part of Google’s I/O announcement is Generative UI: the system now builds a bespoke interactive interface in real time for each query, rather than serving a fixed layout. For product managers, this has structural implications: if AI can generate interfaces on demand, their role shifts from designing screens to defining the rules, data models and intent signals that govern what is generated.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

Exa Labs tripled its valuation to $2.2B in eight months — because AI agents need their own search engine — a16z led a $250M Series C into Exa, which builds search infrastructure for AI agents, using neural embedding models tuned for machine retrieval rather than keyword ranking. Already used by Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, and 400,000+ developers. The bet: AI agents will generate more search queries than humans within the year, and the retrieval layer needs to be rebuilt from scratch to serve them.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data · 🔬 Researchers

bunch closes €30.1M Series B to modernise Europe’s private markets infrastructure — Berlin-based bunch, which builds end-to-end infrastructure for European private markets (cap tables, SPVs, fund admin), raised €30.1M led by Portage with follow-on from Motive Partners and Cherry Ventures. Private markets in Europe are still mostly run on spreadsheets and PDFs, bunch is the bet that automation and AI will eat that workflow the same way it already ate public market back-office ops.
ERT: 3–5 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🚀 Founders

Multiverse raised €60M and acquired Berlin’s StackFuel — to become Europe’s AI upskilling layer — Multiverse (€1.8B valuation, 50% YoY revenue growth) is expanding across Europe with a direct play on the gap between companies deploying AI and workforces that don’t yet know how to use it. Using Berlin-acquired StackFuel as its entry into the German market. Target: 100,000 German workers trained in AI skills, with Mercedes-Benz, Telefónica, and IAV already on the client list.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant · 🇩🇪 Berlin

It’s not just Exa — four AI search startups just raised $350M+ in a single week — Alongside Exa’s $250M, Parallel Web Systems (led by ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal) raised $100M at a $2B valuation from Sequoia, and Tavily and TinyFish are raising too. Investors are pricing the assumption that traditional search is structurally broken for AI use cases, and the retrieval layer is up for grabs. For founders building on top of AI agents, which search infrastructure you pick is now a real product decision.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🚀 Founders

Entry-level roles in Germany’s tech market: what the 2026 funding data actually tells you — Berlin’s seed-to-Series A conversion rate (37%) is higher than London, Munich, or Paris, meaning more early-stage companies survive long enough to hire. Software & AI dominates Berlin’s seed capital; deep tech and hardware dominate Munich’s. If you’re early-career and trying to pick a city, this is the most data-grounded breakdown of where the jobs are forming.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

Happy Monday 💜 and see you next week! Subscribe to stay ahead!

Connect with us via: ampli.xyz | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email

Thanks for reading Ampli Berlin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work

]]><![CDATA[How to Make AI Decisions You Can Actually Defend]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/how-to-make-ai-decisions-you-canhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/how-to-make-ai-decisions-you-canThu, 21 May 2026 07:01:52 GMTAt a UX event last year, someone told me about an enterprise company that built a conversational AI assistant for their customer platform. The instinct was solid. Customers needed faster, more intuitive support. But the team shipped it without ever studying how customers actually solved the problem today. Within months, they quietly pulled it.

The chatbot wasn’t the mistake. Skipping the homework was.

Thanks for reading Ampli Berlin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I keep hearing versions of this story. A team adds conversational AI to a product, the pitch sounds great in a meeting, and a few months later they’re quietly removing it because users hated it. Or worse, ignored it entirely.

The pattern is always the same. The decision happens backwards. A team starts with the technology (”we should add AI here”) and works backward toward a justification. Evidence gathering, if it happens at all, comes in late to validate what’s already been decided. The result is AI features that are technically impressive and practically useless.

I’ve spent 15 years shaping complex digital products, and this keeps repeating everywhere. The harder question isn’t “can we build this?” It’s “should we?” And for whom? Under what constraints? With what boundaries?

That company’s chatbot didn’t fail because the technology was bad. It failed because nobody stopped to ask those questions first.

That’s what this framework is about. Three moves that turn “we need AI” into a clear, defensible product decision. Let me show you how it works with a real scenario.

The Scenario

An enterprise expense platform. Employees frequently don’t understand why their expense reports get rejected. Support ticket volume is high. Frustration is real.

The proposal: add a conversational AI assistant to explain rejection reasons and guide resubmission.

Sounds reasonable. The system already has deterministic, rule-based rejection logic. There are compliance implications. And there’s organizational pressure to reduce those support tickets.

This is the kind of scenario where “let’s add AI” feels like an obvious win. Which is exactly why it’s worth slowing down.

Move 1: Strengthen the Evidence

Use AI to challenge your assumptions before you use AI in your product.

Most proposals carry embedded assumptions that nobody has examined. Before you involve AI in your product, use AI to pressure-test your own thinking.

Start without AI. Write down your clarification questions about the problem. Form a hypothesis about the root cause. Then, and only then, bring AI in to challenge your work. Ask it: what assumptions are embedded in this framing? What might we be missing? What alternative explanations exist? What data would validate or invalidate this?

This means doing the actual homework first. Find out how users complete the task today, through interviews, observations, or usage data. Talk to the people filing those expense reports. Watch them struggle with the rejection screen. Look at the support tickets to see what language they use when they’re confused. That’s your evidence base. AI can help you stress-test it, but it can’t replace it.

AI sharpens evidence. Humans make decisions. AI is excellent at surfacing blind spots. It’s terrible at deciding what matters. Keep that separation clean.

When I ran this exercise with product teams, something interesting happened. Their initial questions were broad. “Why are users confused?” After AI pushed back on their assumptions, their questions got sharper: “Are rejection reasons written in policy language rather than user language?” and “Do repeat submitters have different comprehension patterns than first-timers?” The refinement was significant. Not because AI gave them answers, but because it pressured them to think more precisely.

Move 2: Evaluate the Interface Choice

Conversational AI is an interface decision, not a feature decision.

This is the step most teams skip entirely. And like any interface choice, it has tradeoffs that depend on context.

The question isn’t “would a chatbot be cool here?” It’s: what is the user cognitively experiencing at this moment? Does conversation reduce or increase their cognitive load? What happens if the AI misinterprets a rule? And where must AI stop?

To stress-test this, assign different constraint lenses to the same scenario. In the expense platform example, the answer looks very different depending on who you’re designing for:

  • High compliance / legal implications — A conversational AI that paraphrases policy language could introduce dangerous ambiguity. A misinterpretation isn’t a UX annoyance. It’s a compliance risk.

  • Deterministic, rule-based rejection logic — Conversation may be entirely unnecessary. If the answer is binary and the rules are clear, a structured UI showing “your receipt is missing” is faster and more trustworthy than a chat exchange.

  • First-time employees unfamiliar with policies — Conversation might genuinely help. But only if the AI knows when to hand off to a human, and never presents interpretation as fact.

  • Power users submitting expenses weekly — A chatbot is friction. They don’t need explanation. They need a faster workflow.

  • High support ticket volume pressure — There’s organizational temptation to deploy AI as deflection. But if the AI doesn’t actually resolve the confusion, you’ve just moved the frustration from the support queue into the product.

Conversational AI is an interface choice. Evaluate it like one. The patterns tend to cluster around two insights. Conversation helps when the user’s situation is ambiguous and contextual. Structured UX is stronger when the information is deterministic and the user needs speed, not dialogue. And trust tracks with predictability. Users trust systems that behave consistently more than systems that sound friendly.

Move 3: Make the Decision Explicit

If you can’t write one sentence explaining your AI decision, you’re not ready to build.

The final move is to formalize everything into a Decision Canvas. It’s a structured artifact that forces you to commit to specifics before writing a single line of code.

The canvas has six sections:

  1. Problem Definition — described without mentioning AI at all. If you can’t articulate the problem without referencing the solution, you don’t understand the problem yet.

  2. Evidence — what you actually know, pressure-tested from Move 1.

  3. Risk — what can go wrong, informed by the constraint analysis from Move 2.

  4. Boundaries — where the AI must stop. Non-negotiable lines.

  5. Validation — what you need to test before committing to build.

  6. Decision Statement — a single sentence in this format:

“We will use conversational AI to ___ for ___ because ___. We will not use it for ___ due to ___. Before building, we must validate ___.”

That sentence is the whole point. It’s explicit. It’s reviewable. It’s the kind of statement that can survive a stakeholder challenge because it was built on evidence, not enthusiasm.

AI becomes intentional when decisions are explicit.

Why This Matters Now

The expense platform scenario is a good example. After working through all three moves, some teams conclude that conversational AI is the right choice, but only for a specific user segment, with hard boundaries on what the AI can and cannot say. Others conclude that the real problem was never about AI at all. It was about unclear rejection messages that could be fixed with better content design in a week.

Both are good outcomes. Both are better than shipping a chatbot and hoping for the best.

Every product team I know is facing some version of this pressure. Leadership wants AI in the product. The timeline is tight. The easiest path is to skip the homework and build. This framework doesn’t slow that down. It redirects the energy that would go into building the wrong thing into building the right thing. Or, just as valuably, into deciding not to build at all.

Pick one AI feature your team is currently building or considering. Write down the decision statement from Move 3. Fill in every blank. If you can’t, that’s not a failure. That’s the framework working. You’ve found exactly where the thinking needs to happen before the building starts.

Decisions built on evidence are decisions you can defend.

We're always looking for guest writers. If you have a topic you're passionate about, we'd love to hear from you. Send your pitch to connect@ampli.xyz and we’ll get back to you.

Thanks for reading Ampli Berlin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

]]><![CDATA[#91: Jobs at Kaufland, Intercom, Zapdeck, Just Eat Takeaway.com + more]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/91-jobs-at-kaufland-intercom-zapdeckhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/91-jobs-at-kaufland-intercom-zapdeckMon, 18 May 2026 07:01:25 GMTHey 👋 Ampli community, hope you got some sun this weekend. We've got a fresh stack of roles, events and high-signalling content to share. Let's get into it.

🚀 “The AMPLI Board” of jobs

This week’s hiring picks are live. Head over to the job board and have a look!

The Ampli Board

Spot something off on the board? Missing a feature? Have a brilliant idea? Tell us. Let’s build this together. 💬

✨ This week's Top Picks

  • 🤖 Senior AI Engineer | Multi-agent systems, role incl. VSOP — Zapdeck · Senior · Berlin

    Berlin AI startup building multi-agent systems, this role comes with VSOP equity, meaning you’re being brought in at a level where you’ll shape the architecture from the ground up.
    Min. Requirement: Strong background in AI/ML engineering with hands-on multi-agent system design; senior-level experience shipping production AI products.

  • 🚀 Devops Engineer – EU (Remote) — Coralogix · Mid-Level · Remote (EU)

    Coralogix is a full-stack observability platform used by 2,500+ companies to monitor, analyse, and alert on their infrastructure, and this role is fully remote.
    Min. Requirement: Solid DevOps fundamentals with Kubernetes, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), and CI/CD; comfortable working remotely across distributed teams.

  • 👔 Group Product Manager - AdTech — Delivery Hero · Senior · Berlin

    The AdTech team powers restaurant advertising across the entire Delivery Hero global marketplace.
    Min. Requirement: Senior PM experience in ad tech, performance marketing, or marketplace monetisation; data-driven with strong stakeholder alignment skills.

  • 📱 Senior Android Engineer, Consumer Mobile Platform — Wolt · Senior · Berlin
    Wolt, acquired by DoorDash for $8B, serves tens of millions of users across 25+ countries. The Consumer Mobile Platform team owns the core app experience that powers every order.
    Min. Requirement: 5+ years of Android engineering; deep knowledge of Kotlin, Jetpack, and mobile architecture patterns; experience with large-scale consumer apps.

  • ⚙️ Software Engineer (m/w/d) - Trading Systems Energy — Rabot Energy · Mid-Level · Berlin

    Rabot Energy is building software to automate energy trading for consumers and businesses, combining real-time systems with energy markets.
    Min. Requirement: Backend engineering experience in high-performance or real-time systems; interest or background in energy, finance, or algorithmic trading is a plus.

  • 💻 (Senior) Full-Stack Engineer | Tracking — Kaufland e-commerce · Senior · Berlin

    The Tracking team owns the data infrastructure that powers conversion analytics across their platform.
    Min. Requirement: Full-stack experience with modern web frameworks and a strong data engineering or analytics pipeline background; comfortable owning tracking infra end-to-end.

  • 📊 Senior Data Scientist — Just Eat Takeaway.com · Senior · Berlin

    Just Eat Takeaway.com is one of Europe’s largest food delivery platforms with 100M+ orders annually, and data science here operates at a scale where model improvements translate to millions in impact.
    Min. Requirement: 4+ years in data science with strong Python and ML skills; experience with experimentation, causal inference, or marketplace dynamics preferred.

  • 🎨 Staff AI Designer — Intercom · Senior · Berlin

    Intercom is the AI-first customer communications platform used by 25,000+ businesses globally. This staff-level design role sits at the intersection of AI product design and enterprise UX.
    Min. Requirement: Senior/Staff design experience with a strong portfolio in AI or conversational UI products; Figma-native with the ability to define design systems at scale

Share with a friend

📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of buzzing events!

🖥 High-signal content and news

What happens when AI starts building itself? — Richard Socher (ex-Salesforce Chief Scientist, You.com) and a team from Google DeepMind, Meta AI, and OpenAI launched a lab with a single thesis: the fastest path to superintelligence is AI that autonomously redesigns itself, without human involvement at each cycle. GV, Greycroft, Nvidia, and AMD backed the round at a $4.65B valuation, for a 25-person team with no product yet. Whether recursive self-improvement produces runaway acceleration or hits diminishing returns is the genuinely open question this company is betting $650M on.
ERT: 7–10 min · 🔬 Researchers

Notion just became a programmable layer for AI agents, and it’s free until August. Notion’s new Developer Platform adds Workers (hosted custom code), live database sync from Salesforce/Zendesk/Postgres, and an External Agents API that lets Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Decagon operate inside the workspace natively. Users have already built 1M+ custom agents since February. The strategic bet: teams will consolidate AI workflows into wherever their documents and projects already live, rather than stitching together separate automation tools.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🎨 Design & PMs · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

Runway hit $5.3B and added $40M ARR in one quarter — because it’s betting on world models, not just video— Runway’s three Latin American co-founders have quietly built one of the most financially healthy AI companies in the field. After launching its first world model in December, the company now argues that video generation is the fastest path to models that understand physical reality, a direct challenge to Google’s approach and a bet that Hollywood budgets are just the training data for something much larger.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🚀 Founders

Elephant Company raises €5M to bring AI training to the 70% of workers who don’t sit at a desk 🇩🇪 — Berlin-based Elephant raised €5M led by EnBW New Ventures to scale its AI training platform for frontline and blue-collar teams, turning technical PDFs and documentation into mobile-ready microlearning modules, available at the point of need. Backed by angels from Flix and home24, and targeting a market where most enterprise AI has barely scratched the surface. ERT: 3–5 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

Energy tech: 10 companies that raised the most in 2025 — The top 10 rounds show a clear pattern: debt financing dominated for infrastructure-heavy companies (EV charging, battery storage, grid flexibility), while equity went to deployment-ready platforms. Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, France, and Sweden led deal flow. For founders and job seekers, the map of where capital is concentrated in 2025 is also the map of where hiring will be concentrated in 2026.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🚀 Founders · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

How I Use AI as a Product Manager — Sachin Rekhi (founded Notejoy, ex-LinkedIn PM) published a PM’s practical map of where AI creates leverage in his day-to-day, and it's been making the rounds. He walks through every major PM responsibility — discovery, PRDs, roadmapping, stakeholder comms, analytics — and is specific about where AI genuinely saves hours versus where it still needs you.
ERT: 8–10 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

The graphs that explain the state of AI in 2026 — one of the most-shared reads on HN this week — A data-heavy visual essay mapping where AI actually stands: benchmark saturation, compute scaling curves, the gap between lab performance and real-world deployment, and where the next capability jumps are most likely to come from. Less opinionated than most AI commentary, more useful for forming your own mental model of the field.
ERT: 10–15 min · 🔬 Researchers · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

Happy Monday 💜 and see you next week! Subscribe to stay ahead!

Connect with us via: ampli.xyz | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email

Thanks for reading Ampli Berlin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work

]]><![CDATA[#90: Jobs at shyftplan, N26, handly, Bending Spoons + more]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/90-jobs-at-shyftplan-n26-handly-bendinghttps://ampli.substack.com/p/90-jobs-at-shyftplan-n26-handly-bendingMon, 11 May 2026 07:01:56 GMTHey 👋 Ampli peeps, ready for the short week? Let's get into it.

The Tech Shift Survey

📋 A small ask

Marijana Krstić and Lucija Sičenica are running The Tech Shift Survey, research into how UX, PM, and engineering roles are evolving as tech shifts from growth-at-all-costs to efficiency-first. If you’ve felt your scope quietly expand, your team quietly shrink, or your work suddenly needs defending, they want to hear from you.

10 minutes, anonymous, GDPR-compliant. The findings will be turned into research and presentations aimed at making things a bit better for the rest of us.

If you’ve got the time, it counts. 👉 To the Survey

🚀 “The AMPLI Board” of jobs

This week’s hiring picks are live. Head over to the job board and have a look!

The Ampli Board

Spot something off on the board? Missing a feature? Have a brilliant idea? Tell us. Let’s build this together. 💬

✨ This week's Top Picks

  • 📊 Senior Data Scientist — AUTO1 Group · Senior · Berlin
    Build ML solutions that optimise sales and pricing at Europe’s leading digital automotive platform, home to Autohero and wirkaufendeinauto.de, with millions of transactions per year.
    Min. Requirement: Senior-level data science experience with strong machine learning expertise, Python, and experience in a data-driven product environment.

  • 🤖 Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Tech Foundations — Delivery Hero · Senior · Berlin
    Shape the global ML platform powering one of Europe’s largest tech platforms, operating in 65+ countries.
    Min. Requirement: Senior-level ML engineering experience with Python, deep learning frameworks, and large-scale distributed ML infrastructure.

  • ⚙️ Senior Software Engineer - Pricing & Promotion — Flink · Senior · Berlin
    Engineer the pricing and promotions systems at one of Europe’s most prominent quick-commerce platforms.
    Min. Requirement: Senior-level backend engineering experience with modern tech stacks, distributed systems, and high-throughput API design.

  • 💻 Senior Frontend Engineer — shyftplan · Senior · Berlin
    Build the workforce management platform trusted by major enterprises to schedule and manage shift-based teams at scale across Germany.
    Min. Requirement: Senior-level frontend experience with React or Vue.js, TypeScript, and component-driven architecture.

  • 🚀 Site Reliability Engineer - Access Team — N26 · Mid-Level · Berlin
    Ensure platform reliability at Europe’s leading mobile bank, serving millions of customers across 25 markets with a fully digital banking experience.
    Min. Requirement: Mid-level SRE experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), Kubernetes, and monitoring/observability tooling.

  • 📱 Founding Product Manager - 20VC backed — handly · Senior · Berlin
    Join as the founding PM at a 20VC-backed startup building the next generation of home services technology in Berlin, a ground-floor opportunity with significant ownership.
    Min. Requirement: Product management experience in a fast-paced startup environment with strong technical intuition and willingness to wear multiple hats.

  • 🎨 **UX/UI designer** — Bending Spoons · Mid-Level · Berlin
    Design products used by hundreds of millions at Bending Spoons, one of Europe’s most ambitious tech companies, known for acquiring and scaling apps like Evernote, Meetup, and StreamYard.

    Min. Requirement: Mid-level UX/UI design experience with a strong portfolio, data-informed design thinking, and the ability to ship user-facing products at scale.

  • 🏎️ Autonomous Driving Engineer – Next Generation AV Systems (m/f/d) —Bliq ·Senior · Berlin
    Engineer next-generation autonomous vehicle systems at Bliq, pushing the boundaries of self-driving technology in one of Berlin’s most exciting deep-tech verticals.
    Min. Requirement: Senior-level engineering experience in autonomous driving, robotics, or computer vision with strong C++ or Python and real-time systems expertise.

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

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🖥 High-signal content and news

SAP just paid €1B for an 18-month-old German AI lab — and it’s not about LLMs — SAP is acquiring Freiburg-based Prior Labs and committing €1B over four years to build it into a frontier AI lab for tabular foundation models. Prior Labs raised just €9M in pre-seed, its founders are walking away with over $500M in cash, and its open-source TabPFN model already has 3M+ downloads.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🇩🇪 Germany · 📰 News

Nvidia just backed Europe’s legal AI unicorn — and the Harvey rivalry just got interesting — Swedish legal AI startup Legora crossed $100M ARR and hit a $5.6B valuation after NVIDIA’s NVentures joined its cap table alongside Atlassian — reportedly Nvidia’s first legal AI investment. Legora now trails Harvey ($11B valuation), but the gap is closing fast, and the real risk for both companies is the same: the foundation model makers they’re built on could become their competitors.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🚀 Founders

Genesis AI went full-stack on robotics and unveiled a hand that learns from human gloves — Khosla-backed Genesis AI launched GENE-26.5, its first model for robotic hands, alongside a lightweight data-collection glove that workers can wear on the job, turning daily routines into training data without interrupting them. The insight: the bottleneck for robot training isn’t simulation, it’s evaluation speed, and the glove is a bet that the best data comes from the work itself.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🔬 Researchers

Meta acquired a humanoid AI startup and folded it straight into its Superintelligence Labs — Meta acquired Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI), a seed-stage startup building foundation models for humanoid robots to perform physical labour, merging its team into Meta’s Superintelligence Labs division. Forecasts for the humanoid robot market range from Goldman’s $38B by 2035 to Morgan Stanley’s $5T by 2050; that spread tells you everything about how early this space still is.
ERT: 3–5 min · 📰 News

The Voi founders just raised $16M from a16z for enterprise AI that learns how your company works — Pit, built by the co-founders of European scooter giant Voi (alongside ex-iZettle and Klarna engineers), is going after enterprise AI that studies how a business actually operates and then builds custom software to automate its processes. a16z led the $16M seed as part of its active hunt for the next European unicorn out of Stockholm.
ERT: 4–5 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

Berlin’s Aignostics selected for €14.5M EIC grant to scale AI drug discovery across Europe — Aignostics, the Berlin-based Charité spinout building pathology foundation models for pharma, was one of eight European companies selected for EIC STEP Scale-Up funding, an EU program targeting strategic deep tech with up to €30M per company. Its Atlas 2 model is already top-ranked across 80 pathology benchmarks, trained on 5M+ slide images.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

TechCrunch asked Europe’s top VCs to name the startups they’re watching — here’s the list — 21 startups from Prague to Madrid, pre-launch to growth stage, across counter-drone systems, AI-powered GEO (replacing SEO), nuclear fusion, and enterprise AI, curated by partners at Index, Northzone, 20VC, World Fund, and others. If you’re early in your career and trying to build a map of where European tech is heading.
ERT: 8–12 min · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

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]]><![CDATA[#89: Jobs at Taktile, Getsafe, SumUp, Almedia + more]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/89-jobs-at-taktile-getsafe-sumuphttps://ampli.substack.com/p/89-jobs-at-taktile-getsafe-sumupMon, 27 Apr 2026 07:02:20 GMTHey 👋 We don't know about you, but a sunny Berlin weekend does something for the Monday energy. Let's get into it

🚀 “The AMPLI Board” of jobs

This week’s hiring picks are live. Head over to the job board and have a look!

The Ampli Board

Spot something off on the board? Missing a feature? Have a brilliant idea? Tell us. Let’s build this together. 💬

✨ This week's Top Picks

  • 📊 Senior Product Manager - Decision Engine — Taktile
    Senior · Hybrid · Berlin

    Shape the decision engine powering automated credit, compliance, and risk decisions at one of Berlin’s fastest-rising fintech infrastructure startups.

    Min. Requirement: Senior-level product management experience in fintech or data-intensive platforms with strong technical fluency.

  • 🎨 Senior Product Designer — SumUp
    Senior · Berlin

    Design payment and merchant experiences used by over 4 million small businesses across Europe at one of Berlin’s most established fintech unicorns.

    Min. Requirement: Senior-level product design experience with a strong portfolio in B2B/fintech and hands-on Figma proficiency.

  • 🤖 Senior Data Engineer (m/f/d) — Getsafe
    Senior · Hybrid · Berlin

    Build the data infrastructure behind one of Germany’s leading digital insurance platforms, powering analytics and ML models that drive automated underwriting.

    Min. Requirement: Senior-level data engineering experience with Python, SQL, and modern data stack (dbt, Airflow, or similar).

  • 💻 Frontend Engineer — Helsing
    Mid · Berlin

    Build mission-critical frontend systems at Europe’s leading defence AI company, applying cutting-edge technology to national security challenges.

    Min. Requirement: Mid-level frontend engineering experience with React/TypeScript and a passion for building high-performance UIs.

  • 📱 Founding Mobile Engineer — Almedia
    On-site · Berlin

    Join as the founding mobile engineer at Almedia, a fast-growing Berlin startup building the next generation of app monetisation and user acquisition technology.

    Min. Requirement: Strong mobile development experience with React Native or TypeScript, plus comfort owning the full mobile stack from day one.

  • 🛒 Senior Software Engineer - Checkout (d/f/m) — vivenu
    Senior · Germany

    Architect the checkout systems powering ticketing for the Grammys, Golden Globes, and Stanford University at one of the world’s fastest-growing live entertainment tech firms.

    Min. Requirement: Senior-level full-stack experience with React/Next.js, Node.js or GoLang, and MongoDB in a high-traffic API-first environment.

  • 💰 Engineering Manager - Billing & Payments (f/m/d) — Awin Global Manager · Remote · EU

    Build and lead a new engineering team from the ground up in the Billing & Payments tribe at the world’s leading affiliate marketing network.

    Min. Requirement: Proven engineering management experience leading distributed teams of 5+, with strong delivery focus in complex billing/payments domains.

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of buzzing events!

🖥 High-signal content and news

Cursor rebuilt its entire IDE for the age of agent fleets — and developers are split on whether that’s progress — Cursor 3 ditched the VS Code fork and rebuilt the interface from scratch around an Agents Window: you now orchestrate multiple AI agents running in parallel across repos, locally, in the cloud, and via SSH, rather than editing code yourself.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

Uber is acquiring Berlin’s Blacklane — one of Europe’s most significant mobility exits in years 🇩🇪 — Uber signed an agreement to acquire Berlin-founded Blacklane, a premium chauffeur service operating in 500+ cities. The deal accelerates Uber’s push into luxury travel via Uber Elite and is one of the cleaner European startup exits of the year.
ERT: 3–5 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 📰 News

Q1 2026 shattered every VC record on the books — here’s what the macro moment means for founders — Global startup funding hit $297B in Q1 2026, more than all of 2025 combined, anchored by OpenAI’s $122B round at an $852B valuation and Anthropic’s $30B Series G. The signal for founders outside the frontier lab tier: seed-stage AI rounds are also commanding higher valuations at earlier stages than ever before.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🚀 Founders

99 days to EU AI Act enforcement — if your product touches hiring or credit, you should be auditing now — August 2, 2026 is the full enforcement date for high-risk AI under the EU AI Act, covering AI used in hiring, credit scoring, education access, and biometrics, with fines up to 7% of global annual revenue for violations. If you haven’t mapped which of your AI systems qualify as high-risk and started your conformity assessments, there’s a real chance you won’t finish in time.
ERT: 6–8 min · 📰 News

NeoCognition emerges from stealth with $40M to build AI agents that learn from experience — Ohio State professor Yu Su spun out his AI agent lab into NeoCognition, backed by Cambium Capital, Walden Catalyst, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica. The bet: today’s agents are stateless generalists that reset after every session, NeoCognition is building persistent, personalised agents that improve with use.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🔬 Researchers

Figma opened its canvas to AI agents — and your design system is now the quality filter — Coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex can now write directly to Figma files using your actual components, variables, and tokens, not generic templates. The key innovation is "Skills": markdown files that teach agents your team's conventions, so output reflects your design system instead of the usual AI slop. The catch: messy, undocumented systems will produce poor results, which means the quality of your design system just became a product velocity issue.
ERT: 5–7 min · 🎨 Design & PMs

€420M in new European pre-seed funds just closed — here’s where the early jobs are coming from — DFF Ventures closed a €70M Fund III, capping a quarter that saw roughly €420M in new early-stage European VC close across DFF, Ananda Impact Ventures, The Footprint Firm, and Constructor Capital. Pre-seed capital means companies that don’t exist yet on job boards. If you’re early-career and watching where to move, this is the wave to ride.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant

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]]><![CDATA[#88: Jobs at N26, Delivery Hero, Qonto, Pitch, and more!]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/88-jobs-at-n26-delivery-hero-qontohttps://ampli.substack.com/p/88-jobs-at-n26-delivery-hero-qontoSun, 19 Apr 2026 09:50:34 GMTHi Ampli community 👋

Workshop Vol. 3 is here, and we can’t wait!

Product Lead Dorra Mlouhi (AWS) is taking us in a hands-on workshop with Cursor and MCPs to compress hours of market research into sharp, high-quality output. Think competitor intelligence and strategic opportunities, in one session.

📍 Bonus: we’re heading to OjinAixHaus, Berlin Mitte’s newest AI community space.

⚡ Early bird open. Only 20 spots, go and grab your ticket.

Early Bird Ticket

🚀 “The AMPLI Board” of jobs

This week’s hiring picks are live. Head over to the job board and have a look!

The Ampli Board

Spot something off on the board? Missing a feature? Have a brilliant idea? Tell us. Let’s build this together. 💬

✨ This week's Top Picks from the Board

👔 Director of Software Engineering (f/m/x) — Enpal · Leadership ·

  • Berlin Lead engineering teams at one of Europe’s fastest-growing greentech unicorns, driving the technical vision behind Enpal’s solar energy platform at scale.

  • Min. Requirement: Director-level engineering leadership with experience scaling teams in a high-growth environment.

⚙️ Backend Engineer - Acquire — N26 · Mid · Berlin

  • Join N26’s Acquire team and build the backend systems that power one of Europe’s most recognised mobile banks, serving millions of customers across 24 markets.

  • Min. Requirement: Mid-level backend engineering experience with distributed systems and API development.

📱 Lead Software Engineer – Flutter/iOS — HERE Technologies · Lead · Hybrid

  • Berlin Lead mobile development at the company behind the location platform powering Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and millions of navigation experiences worldwide.

  • Min. Requirement: Lead-level Flutter or iOS engineering with experience driving cross-platform mobile architecture.

🤖 Senior AI Scientist (Agentic AI) – Vendor Data Team — Delivery Hero · Mid

  • Berlin Build agentic AI systems for Delivery Hero’s Vendor Data Team, applying LLMs and ML pipelines at scale across one of the world’s largest food delivery platforms.

  • Min. Requirement: Mid-level Python experience with ML/LLM frameworks and cloud deployment (AWS or GCP).

🎨 Senior Product Designer — Pitch · Senior · Remote

  • Design the future of collaborative presentations at Pitch, the Berlin-born presentation tool challenging traditional slide decks with a modern, design-first approach.

  • Min. Requirement: Senior-level product design experience with Figma and a strong portfolio in SaaS/productivity tools.

📊 Product Manager - KYC/KYB — Qonto · Mid ·

  • Berlin Own the KYC/KYB product strategy at one of Europe’s leading business finance platforms, shaping compliance and onboarding for hundreds of thousands of SMEs.

  • Min. Requirement: Mid-level product management experience in fintech, compliance, or identity verification.

🎓 Werkstudent Data & Analytics im Public Sektor (m/w/d) — Sopra Steria · Remote ·

  • Germany Dive into data analytics and public sector consulting at one of Europe’s largest IT services firms, building dashboards and insights that shape government digital services.

  • Min. Requirement: Enrolled student with SQL and data visualisation skills; interest in public sector digital transformation.

🎓 Werkstudent*in Erklärbare Künstliche Intelligenz — Fraunhofer HHI · Hybrid ·

  • Berlin Research explainable AI at one of Germany’s top research institutes, contributing to cutting-edge work on making deep learning models interpretable and trustworthy.

  • Min. Requirement: Enrolled student with Python and machine learning foundations; interest in XAI and deep learning research

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of buzzing events!

  • Octonous by Mozilla.ai — Build an AI Agent for Your Job — Tuesday, Apr 21 Hands-on workshop to build your own AI agent for real work workflows — no code needed. Bring your laptop. Spots limited & approval-required. 📍 Berlin (address revealed post-approval) 🔗 RSVP

  • Big Berlin Hack — >300 Builders & >50k in Prizes — Weekend Apr 25–26 Full weekend AI hackathon by {Tech: Europe} × CODE University. Matchmaking, building, pitching, prizes. Apply by ticket type. 📍 Berlin (address revealed post-approval) 🔗 RSVP

  • Berlin AI Meetup #1 — Tuesday, May 12 New meetup series for engineers, founders, PMs & operators building with AI. Talks on incident response, AI guardrails + open mic demos. 📍 Contentful, Max-Urich-Straße 3 🔗 RSVP

  • Applied AI Conf Berlin — Thursday, May 28 Curated full-day conference for technical founders & engineering leaders shipping AI in production. Talks, workshops, live demos — practitioners only. 📍 The Delta Campus, Berlin 🔗 RSVP

  • Berlin AI, ML & Computer Vision Meetup — Friday, Apr 24 Talks, demos & networking for AI/ML practitioners. Covers CV, AI agents and data-centric approaches. Pizza + drinks included. 📍 MotionLab, Bouchéstraße 12, Halle 20 🔗 RSVP

  • DataTalksClub Berlin Meetup — Tuesday, Apr 28 Three practitioner talks on agentic feature engineering (Zalando), AI model research harness (Elasticsearch) and ranking migration with code agents. Pizza + networking. 📍 Berlin (check Meetup for venue) 🔗 RSVP

  • Agentic AI: Business Boost for Your Productivity — Wednesday, Apr 29 SIBB morning event at Merantix AI Campus. Hands-on examples and real-world use cases for AI agents in business workflows. 📍 Merantix AI Campus, Max-Urich-Straße 3 🔗 RSVP

  • Rise of AI Conference 2026 — May 5–6 Annual gathering of Europe’s AI ecosystem — 10th edition. Keynotes, panels on industrial AI, governance, and societal implications. 📍 Humboldt Carré, Berlin 🔗 RSVP

  • Deep Tech Nexus Meetup #11 — Tuesday, May 19 Informal meetup connecting researchers, founders, investors & builders across Berlin’s deep tech ecosystem. 11th edition @ MotionLab. 📍 MotionLab.Berlin 🔗 RSVP

🖥 High-signal content and news

Your idle Mac is now an AI inference node — and it earns you money — Eigen Labs launched Darkbloom on April 15: a decentralised inference network routing AI requests through idle Apple Silicon Macs at 50–70% lower cost than AWS/Azure, with end-to-end encryption via Apple’s Secure Enclave. The API is OpenAI-compatible — one line change to switch — and Mac owners keep 95% of revenue.

ERT: 6–8 min · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

UC Berkeley hacked every major AI agent benchmark — without solving a single task. Researchers built an agent that scored near-perfect on all 8 of the most cited AI benchmarks (SWE-bench, WebArena, GAIA, and more) without a single LLM call — just by exploiting how scores are computed. Companies cite these numbers in press releases, and investors use them to justify valuations, so this is a bigger deal than it sounds.

ERT: 15–20 min · 🔬 Researchers

GitHub’s co-founder is rebuilding Git for the AI agent era — from Berlin 🇩🇪 — GitButler raised a $17M Series A led by a16z to fix the version control workflows that AI coding agents are quietly breaking. Scott Chacon (GitHub co-founder, author of Pro Git) is building parallel branches, stacked worktrees, agent-specific commands, and MCP support. Git redesigned for humans and agents alike.

ERT: 5–7 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

Khosla, Sequoia, and Blackstone just handed $150M to an enterprise AI coding startup — Factory, a three-year-old startup building AI coding agents for enterprise engineering teams, closed $150M at a $1.5B valuation, with Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young, and Palo Alto Networks already on the client list. Investors are clearly betting the enterprise coding agent market is big enough for multiple winners alongside Cursor, Claude Code, and Cognition.

ERT: 4–6 min · 🚀 Founders

Vibe coding for strategy: Rocket 1.0 wants to replace McKinsey for $4K/year — Rocket launched a platform that combines market research, competitive intelligence, and go-to-market recommendations in one AI workflow — 1.5M users, $4K ARPU, 50%+ gross margins at 57 people. For PMs drowning in discovery work, this is worth a look.

ERT: 4–6 min · 🎨 Design & PMs · 🚀 Founders

The court just ruled: your Claude chats can be subpoenaed — A Manhattan federal judge ordered a defendant to hand over 31 documents created with Claude, ruling that AI chat logs are not protected by attorney-client privilege. For teams building tools that touch legal, compliance, or HR workflows: the enterprise vs. consumer AI distinction just became a legal compliance boundary, not just a pricing tier.

ERT: 5–7 min · 📰 News

Berlin vs. Munich: where Germany’s tech money is actually going in 2026 🇩🇪 — Munich overtook Berlin in total VC in 2025 (€2.7B vs €2.4B) for the first time, driven by deep tech and hardware, but Berlin still leads in seed and dominates for B2B SaaS and digital products. Understanding this split matters if you’re deciding where to build or where to look for your next role in Germany.

ERT: 4–6 min · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant · 🚀 Founders

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]]><![CDATA[#87: Jobs at eBay, Sony Music, Kittl, EY, and more!]]>https://ampli.substack.com/p/87-jobs-at-ebay-sony-music-kittlhttps://ampli.substack.com/p/87-jobs-at-ebay-sony-music-kittlMon, 13 Apr 2026 07:01:58 GMT

Hi Ampli community 👋

Workshop Vol. 3 is here and we can’t wait!

Product Lead Dorra Mlouhi (AWS) is taking us in a hands-on workshop with Cursor and MCPs to compress hours of market research into sharp, high-quality output. Think competitor intelligence and strategic opportunities, in one session.

📍 Bonus: we’re heading to OjinAixHaus, Berlin Mitte’s newest AI community space.

⚡ Early bird open. Only 20 spots, go and grab your ticket.

Early Bird Ticket

🚀 “The AMPLI Board” of jobs

Another week so a fresh new batch of companies hiring showing on the board now, go and check it out.

The Ampli Board

Spot something off on the board? Missing a feature? Have a brilliant idea? Tell us. Let’s build this together. 💬

✨ This week's Top Picks from the Board

  • 👔 Senior Director, Engineering — Intercom · Leadership · Berlin Build and lead Intercom’s new Berlin R&D hub as the founding senior engineering leader, scaling a world-class team from the ground up. Min. Requirement: Director+ experience leading 100+ engineer orgs at a high-growth SaaS company.

  • 📱 Lead Developer Mobile Apps — EY · Staff/Lead · Berlin Lead mobile development for digital health solutions across iOS, Android and web in EY’s Digital Health Excellence Center. Min. Requirement: 3–5 years mobile dev in healthcare with Swift, Kotlin, and React.

  • ⚙️ Senior DevOps Engineer — Kittl · Senior · Berlin Build and evolve the platform infrastructure that enables product teams to ship quickly at the design tool challenging Adobe. Min. Requirement: Senior-level experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and IaC tools (Pulumi/Terraform).

  • 🖥️ Senior Frontend Engineer (React) — eRecht24 · Senior · Berlin Own and scale the frontend architecture for Germany’s leading legal-tech compliance platform used by thousands of companies. Min. Requirement: Senior-level React experience with REST API integration and scalable SPA architecture.

  • 🔧 Backend Developer — Sony Music · Mid · Berlin Develop backend solutions, APIs and microservices powering corporate websites and app backends for one of the world’s biggest music labels. Min. Requirement: Mid-level experience with PHP 8 and/or Node.js/TypeScript, plus MySQL and Docker.

  • 📊 Product Manager — eBay · Mid · Berlin Shape ecommerce product strategy for a platform empowering millions of buyers and sellers across 190+ markets worldwide. Min. Requirement: Mid-level product management experience in ecommerce or marketplace environments.

  • 🤖 AI Engineering Intern (Stealth AI Venture) — Merantix Capital · Working Student · Berlin Build the AI core of a stealth energy venture — data pipelines, inference layers and reasoning agents for autonomous energy operations. Min. Requirement: Hands-on experience shipping ML models with Python and LLMs.

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📆 Upcoming Tech Events

Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of buzzing events!

  • Framer Mastery Workshop — Tuesday, Apr 14 🔗 RSVP
    Full-day hands-on workshop for designers ready to ship production websites without code. Led by Framer mentor Ryan Hayward.

  • Build Your First AI SaaS Startup — Wednesday, Apr 15 🔗 RSVP
    In-person workshop for founders and devs covering MVP design, AI tooling, and go-to-market. At Regus Office, Berlin.

  • GraphRAG & Generative AI Workshop — Thursday, Apr 16 🔗 RSVP
    Hands-on session at CODE University hosted by Global AI Berlin. Build apps with Neo4j + LangChain. Free drinks & swag. Sponsored by Microsoft & Neo4j.

  • BLISS x Semrush: Agentic AI in Production — Thursday, Apr 16 🔗 RSVP
    2-hour technical workshop on building and operating AI agents in production. Led by Semrush’s Lead AI Engineer. Pizza + networking after.

  • AI in Healthcare — DMEA Preevent — Monday, Apr 20 🔗 RSVP via Allevents

    Panel at Google Berlin on how AI is transforming healthcare processes. Hosted by PwC, Google & UKSH.

  • Founders & Friends Berlin — AI Integration — Wednesday, Apr 29 🔗 RSVP via Eventbrite

    Networking meetup at Avomind for founders and builders exploring AI integration

🖥 High-signal content and news

Startup funding shatters all records in Q1 2026 — $297 billion raised in a single quarter. AI is the engine, and the gap between AI-native startups and everything else is widening fast. For Berlin founders in the room with European and global VCs this spring, understanding this macro shift is table stakes, the bar for what counts as “fundable” just moved. ERT: 4–5 min | 💎 Startups

Sierra’s Bret Taylor says the era of clicking buttons is over — Sierra’s Ghostwriter now builds agents that build agents. Taylor’s thesis: the GUI is being retired. This isn’t a 10-year prediction, products shipping today are already bypassing the traditional interface layer. ERT: 5–6 min | ⭐️ Product

Berlin is calling: where Germany’s tech funding is actually going in 2026 — Berlin’s VC-backed startups are now collectively worth €169 billion, 43% of Germany’s total startup ecosystem value. Software & AI leads seed funding at €557M, and the city is doing something quietly remarkable: holding its own as Munich tries to claim the top spot. ERT: 5–6 min | 🇩🇪 Berlin

How Meta used AI to map tribal knowledge in large-scale data pipelines — Meta’s engineering blog details a production-grade AI system that surfaces undocumented institutional knowledge across massive data infrastructure. For many scale-up engineering teams hitting the “our codebase has memory but we don’t” wall, this could be a concrete playbook. ERT: 7–9 min | 🧑‍💻 Engineering and Data

The AI gold rush is pulling private wealth into riskier, earlier bets — Family offices are bypassing VCs entirely to get on seed-stage AI cap tables. The distribution of early capital is shifting structurally, and founders who understand this new funding landscape have a meaningful edge in who they approach first and how they position early rounds. ERT: 4–5 min | 🚀 Founders

State of UX 2026: Design Deeper to Differentiate — After two years of layoffs and hiring freezes, design is stabilising, but the pressure to demonstrate business impact isn’t going away. NNG’s annual report reads as a practical guide for designers and PMs navigating the “do more with AI, prove it counts” era. The section on differentiation strategy is directly applicable if you’re in a Berlin product team right now. ERT: 8–10 min | 🎨 Design & PM

It’s 2026. AI writes most of my code. Now what? — The HN thread that junior devs and career-switchers are quietly passing around. Hard data on who AI affects (juniors: -10% employment; seniors: barely) plus a grounded discussion on what skills still compound. Nothing to panic, just a bit of clarity, it could be exactly what someone at the start of their tech career needs to read this week. ERT: 6–8 min | 🌱 Entry

Happy Monday 💜 and see you next week! Subscribe to stay ahead!

Connect with us via: ampli.xyz | Instagram | LinkedIn | Email

Thanks for reading Ampli Berlin! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.a

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