Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
About the Role
This is a founding-team engineering role at a construction technology AI startup, sitting at the intersection of engineering and customer success. You will own new AI automation use cases end-to-end, from discovery with enterprise stakeholders through production deployment, and have real influence over what gets built and how the company scales.
What You'll Do
Own AI automation use cases end-to-end, from customer discovery through production deployment.
Turn ambiguous enterprise customer problems into scoped, buildable solutions and ship them quickly.
Build with modern applied AI including LLMs, agentic workflows, vision models, and embeddings.
Design and implement data pipelines for document ingestion, extraction, validation, and orchestration.
Identify recurring patterns across projects and codify them into reusable templates.
Balance speed, accuracy, and pragmatism, keeping humans in the loop where appropriate.
Travel to customer sites and work directly with German enterprise stakeholders.
Help shape the technical direction of both product and company as an early hire.
What We're Looking For
2+ years of experience as a software engineer or data scientist building production systems.
Hands-on experience deploying applied AI solutions (LLMs, agentic workflows, vision models, embeddings) in production.
Strong CS fundamentals, from a degree or clearly equivalent formal grounding.
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 workflows.
Comfortable working with unstructured data (PDFs, images, documents), vector databases, and semantic search.
Experience integrating multiple LLM providers (such as OpenAI, Azure, Gemini, or Cohere) and solid prompt engineering skills.
B2B experience, ideally in a customer-facing technical role with direct enterprise engagement.
Experience in an early-stage startup or founding team environment.
C1-level German proficiency or above (required for enterprise customer interaction and on-site visits).
Bonus: familiarity with domain ontologies, knowledge graphs, or construction industry workflows.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: 72,000 to 100,000 EUR annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
On-site, 5 days per week in Berlin, Germany, with occasional travel to customer sites across the region.