About Vainu

Vainu is a Nordic sales intelligence platform helping B2B companies identify and act on the right signals at the right time. Our data pipelines process millions of company records, financial statements, job postings, and procurement documents. We're expanding fast into AI-powered enrichment and agentic workflows.

We're a team of 80 people across Finland and Sweden, with most of our 15-person engineering team based in Helsinki. Our office is in Hakaniemi.

The role

We're looking for a backend-focused software engineer with solid Python skills. Seniority matters less than mindset: we want someone who sees an unfamiliar codebase and thinks, "I'll figure it out."

You'll work on the systems that make Vainu's data products run: pipelines, APIs, orchestration, and increasingly, AI-powered enrichment. The interesting stuff right now is at the intersection of data engineering and AI: vector databases, RAG, semantic search, and ingesting everything from structured feeds to raw PDFs.

The team is small and senior-leaning. You'll be trusted with real ownership from day one, expected to figure things out independently, and encouraged to push back when something doesn't make sense.

What you'll work on

Data pipelines & ingestion
Building and extending the infrastructure that processes new data types at scale.

Pipeline orchestration
Running and expanding workflows in Argo Workflows / Kubernetes.
Backend services & developer experience
Python services, APIs, and CI/CD tooling that make the whole team faster.

AI-powered data enrichment
Vector databases, RAG pipelines, semantic search — processing and indexing large volumes of text data for AI-powered features.

How you work

This is the part we actually care most about. Read it carefully, we mean it.

You know that writing code is the smallest part of building software, and you've internalized what that actually means.
You ship things that are good enough to be useful, then make them better. You don't wait for perfect.
You use AI tools, including Claude, to move faster, but you own what you ship and don't let generated code slide through without scrutiny.
You thrive in a flat organization with rapid decision-making. You like to take full, end-to-end ownership of every feature you ship.
You default to action. You'd rather make a call, learn you were wrong, and adjust than wait in analysis paralysis.
You think Scrum solves the wrong problems, and you can explain exactly why.
Your first instinct is to question the framing of a problem, not just solve it as given.
You prototype before you theorize. If it doesn't work, you try something else — you don't spend three days planning what you could have tested in an afternoon.
You ruthlessly prioritize. You're always asking, "Is this actually the problem we should be solving right now?"
The idea of hyperfocusing on one thing for weeks without distractions makes you slightly uneasy.

Technical baseline

Strong Python is the non-negotiable (at least 3+ years). Everything else we can work with.

Experience with data engineering, ETL, or pipeline work
Familiarity with CI/CD, GitLab, containerization, or cloud infrastructure
Exposure to vector databases, RAG, or LLM-driven workflows is a plus — but curiosity and the ability to learn fast matter more than a specific background

Practical details

Location: Helsinki, Hakaniemi
Work model: Hybrid, 2–3 days/week in office
Start date: August 2026
Compensation (gross/year)
- Mid €50k–65k
- Senior €66k–84k

The process

HR screening call
Online interview
Technical session & live coding — preferably at the Helsinki office, and a good chance to meet the team
Reference calls
Decision

Questions?

Pauliina from Vainu's HR is happy to help: pauliina@vainu.io or +358 44 238 8007.