Forward Deployed Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: Berlin

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

This is a customer-embedded engineering role at an early-stage AI startup building purpose-built automation tools for the sea and air freight industry. You'll sit at the intersection of logistics operations and product engineering — translating deep customer workflow challenges into production-grade software alongside a small founding team. The work is high-ownership, high-impact, and directly shapes how the product evolves.

What You'll Do

• Partner directly with logistics teams to understand operational workflows and translate their needs into system design.

• Build AI-powered tools across the full stack using Node.js and TypeScript.

• Integrate with enterprise ecosystems — ERP, TMS, SFTP, event queues — and build reliable data pipelines for messy, real-world data.

• Shape product direction and technical decisions alongside the founding team.

• Travel regularly to key customer accounts across Europe and Asia to maintain close relationships.

• Own outcomes end-to-end, from design through deployment, writing clean, production-ready code throughout.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years building full-stack applications or backend systems in production environments.

• Strong proficiency in TypeScript and Node.js for backend development.

• Proven experience designing and integrating with enterprise systems (ERP, TMS, APIs, data pipelines).

• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure tools such as Docker, Terraform, GCP, or AWS.

• Experience building and maintaining backend infrastructure at scale.

• Track record of shipping to production quickly and iterating based on real user feedback.

• Comfort working directly with end-users or customers to gather requirements and validate solutions.

• Willingness and ability to travel regularly to customer sites.

• Nice to have: React or modern frontend framework experience; familiarity with GenAI/LLM architectures (RAG, evals, orchestration); background in logistics, supply chain, or operations; early-stage startup experience.

Location

Berlin, Germany — hybrid. Regular travel to customer sites across Europe and Asia is an integral part of the role. Visa sponsorship is not available.