Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: Berlin

Employment Type: FullTime

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.