Job: Customer Engineer (d/w/m)

About OpenSanctions#

OpenSanctions helps to keep people and companies accountable for their political and economic actions. We build a database that tracks a wide range of entities in the public interest: sanctioned companies, politicians, fraudsters, and criminals. Originally built to support anti-corruption journalists, OpenSanctions has also become a powerful tool used by hundreds of commercial clients worldwide for know-your-customer screening, legal compliance, and in-depth investigative analysis.

We are a small, bootstrapped, sustainable business. Transparency and accessibility are core to how we work: our pipeline is open source, and public search is free for everyone. We’re hiring a Customer Engineer to help customers implement OpenSanctions and to improve the experience as our user base grows.

The Role#

You’ll help technical users integrate OpenSanctions data into their services and keep their local deployments healthy over time. This is a support-first role for someone who has experience building software and enjoys using that experience to unblock other engineers: diagnosing issues, explaining trade-offs, and shipping crisp examples and docs.

You’ll work closely with our Customer Success and Engineering teams. A typical week includes reproducing issues from API requests, inspecting data and matching behavior, and untangling questions that sit at the intersection of “how the world works” and “how the software works.” (Yes, sometimes that means figuring out whether a place is a country, whether a name is an alias, or whether a result is a matching explanation issue rather than a data issue.)

You will write code sometimes, but it’s usually small and practical: minimal repro scripts, query examples, Postman collections, deployment helpers, and documentation improvements. The goal is to reduce friction and help users move forward with confidence.

This role is not#

• A ticket-metric grind. Our measure is correctness and clarity, not volume.
• A quota-carrying sales role.
• Primarily a product feature delivery role.

What you’ll do#

You’ll spend most of your time on a mix of customer problem-solving and making support scale through better patterns and documentation:

• Respond to technical questions about our API, data model, and self-hosted stack (often Docker, sometimes Kubernetes), across HubSpot, a forum, Slack, and calls.
• Reproduce and debug issues from real customer inputs (API requests, payloads, logs), then propose a clear fix or workaround.
• Create and maintain examples and solution snippets (Python and curl, plus Postman collections where useful).
• Turn recurring questions into improvements: docs, FAQs, templates, and checklists.
• Write high-quality GitHub issues from support threads, including a tight summary, steps to reproduce, and customer impact. When appropriate, share a tracking link or issue reference back to the customer to create a paper trail.

About you#

Required#

• You communicate clearly with technical users and you do not mind being in conversations all day.
• You can debug methodically: form a hypothesis, verify with evidence, and explain what you found.
• You are comfortable with APIs: writing requests, inspecting JSON, reading docs, and identifying what is missing or misleading.
• You can write small scripts (Python preferred, JavaScript also fine) to reproduce issues or generate useful outputs.
• You have worked with Docker deployments and can reason about logs, configs, ports, and basic infrastructure concepts.
• Fluent English (written and spoken), and you can overlap working hours with CET (preferably CET ±3).

Nice to have#

• Familiarity with fuzzy matching, entity resolution, search, or ranking systems.
• Interest in sanctions, AML/KYC workflows, OSINT, or investigative research.
• Experience with support tooling (HubSpot), or a strong instinct for turning messy inputs into a clean queue and crisp escalation paths.

Tech Stack#

We work primarily in Python and ship an API service (FastAPI). Many customer deployments involve Docker, sometimes Kubernetes, and search backends like Elasticsearch or OpenSearch. Day-to-day collaboration happens in GitHub, HubSpot, and Slack.

• Many of the deployment issues relate to:
  • Docker deployment, often via Kubernetes
  • Big clouds (AWS/GCP/Azure/Lidl)
  • We ship a FastAPI app that uses ElasticSearch/OpenSearch as a backend
  • Maybe you can convert us to Postman as a belief system

You’ll be successful here if#

• You reduce repeat questions by shipping docs and snippets
• You build a small internal support toolkit (templates, checklists, repro harness)
• You improve first-response quality and resolution time
• You feed engineering with high-quality bug reports and prioritized pain points

What we offer#

• Flexible workload - 50%-100%; tell us what suits you.
• Remote-first culture with an optional desk in our Berlin office.
• Async culture and flexible hours - work where and when you’re most productive.
• Small, friendly team - not “hyper-growth” burnout vibes.
• Employment under German law if resident in Germany, freelance contract or EOR elsewhere.

How to apply#

Email jobs@opensanctions.org us with a short note on why this role fits you, plus your CV. If you have public repos, tech writing, or documentation you’re proud of, include it. If most of your work is private, that’s normal, just describe a couple of problems you’ve debugged and how you approached them.

We are hoping to fill this role as soon as we find the right candidate, so please don't hesitate to apply if you feel like this is you. We look forward to meeting you!