Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
About the Role
This is a founding-team position at an early-stage B2B AI startup in the construction technology space, sitting at the intersection of engineering and customer success. You will own AI automation use cases end-to-end, from discovering enterprise customer problems through to shipping production-ready solutions in weeks. As a day-zero hire on a small Berlin team, you will have direct influence on product direction and how the company scales.
What You'll Do
Own new AI automation use cases from customer discovery through production deployment on the company platform.
Turn ambiguous enterprise problems into scoped, buildable solutions and ship them quickly.
Build applied AI solutions using LLMs, agentic workflows, vision models, embeddings, and heuristics.
Design and implement data pipelines for document ingestion, extraction, validation, and orchestration.
Identify recurring patterns across projects and codify them into reusable templates.
Work directly with enterprise stakeholders, including on-site customer visits, to gather requirements and explain technical trade-offs.
Help shape the technical direction of both the product and the company.
What We're Looking For
2+ years of experience as a software engineer or data scientist building production systems.
Strong CS fundamentals, from a degree or clearly equivalent formal grounding.
Hands-on experience deploying applied AI in production: LLMs, agentic workflows, vision models, and embeddings.
Full-stack capability: backend API development in Node.js/TypeScript or Python, and frontend development in TypeScript/React or similar.
Experience designing data pipelines for document processing, extraction, and validation with unstructured data such as PDFs and images.
Experience integrating multiple LLM providers (e.g., OpenAI, Azure, Gemini, Cohere) and solid prompt engineering skills.
Familiarity with vector databases, semantic search, or knowledge graphs is a plus.
B2B experience, ideally in a customer-facing or customer success technical role.
Background in early-stage startups or founding teams; comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration.
C1-level German or above, essential for working directly with German enterprise stakeholders.
Pragmatic, action-oriented, and excited about applied AI over theory.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: 72,000 to 100,000 EUR annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
On-site, five days per week in Berlin, Germany, with occasional travel to customer sites across the region.