Founding Forward Deployed Engineer
About the Role
This is a founding-team engineering role at an early-stage construction technology AI startup, sitting at the intersection of engineering and customer success. You will own AI automation use cases end-to-end, from scoping problems with enterprise customers through to shipping production-ready solutions, and have real influence over product direction and company culture from day one.
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, to solve high-impact problems.
Design and implement data pipelines for document ingestion, extraction, validation, and orchestration.
Identify recurring patterns across projects and codify them into reusable, scalable templates.
Balance speed, accuracy, and pragmatism, knowing when to keep humans in the loop.
Visit customers on-site and work directly with German-speaking enterprise stakeholders to gather requirements.
Help shape the technical direction of both the product and the company as an early hire.
What We're Looking For
2 or more 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, through 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 with unstructured data (PDFs, images, documents).
Experience with vector databases, semantic search, or domain ontologies.
Comfortable integrating multiple LLM providers (such as OpenAI, Azure, Gemini, or Cohere) and writing effective prompts.
Proven ability to own problems end-to-end, from requirements gathering through deployment.
B2B experience with enterprise stakeholders, and a background in early-stage startups or founding teams.
C1-level German proficiency or above (this is a customer-facing role with German enterprise clients).
Comfortable with travel to customer sites and working fully on-site in Berlin five days a week.
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 country.