Founding Engineer
About the Role
This is a founding-level engineering role at an early-stage AI startup building purpose-built automation for the sea and air freight industry. You will sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success, helping take the product from demo-stage to a scalable, production-ready system that freight forwarders rely on daily. Your work will directly shape the company's technical and product direction from the ground up.
What You'll Do
Lead customer conversations and translate insights into concrete product features and technical strategy.
Design, build, and ship full-stack applications using Node.js, TypeScript, React, and Python.
Push the AI capabilities of the product forward, including LLM design patterns, vector stores, and model fine-tuning.
Transition the product from prototype and demo mode into a scalable, high-quality production system.
Contribute to shaping the product roadmap, architecture decisions, and overall company direction.
What We're Looking For
2 or more years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production applications.
Full-stack development skills: Node.js, TypeScript, and React on the frontend; Python on the backend.
Hands-on experience with LLM design patterns, vector stores, and model fine-tuning.
Experience designing and deploying scalable products from MVP through to production.
Comfort leading customer conversations and turning feedback into clear product requirements.
Strong system-design ability, including reasoning about scope, constraints, and trade-offs in a startup context.
Experience in startup or early-stage environments, with a bias toward pragmatic, startup-appropriate architecture decisions.
Broad product-engineering range rather than a background concentrated in a single discipline such as ML, data, or frontend.
Bonus: experience with vector databases, semantic search, or transitioning products from prototype to production.
Location
Hybrid from Berlin, Germany. Visa sponsorship is available.