Founding Engineer / Lead Architect

Department: Technology

Location: Germany

Employment Type: FullTime

THRIVO WEALTH PARTNERS AG

Founding Engineer / Lead Architect

ThrivoOS · Full-Time · Remote Europe · CET core hours

5–8+ years · Architecture ownership · Equity

About Thrivo

The independent wealth management industry is at an inflection point. AI, regulatory pressure, and a looming succession wave will determine which firms thrive — and which flounder — in the coming decade.

Thrivo Wealth Partners AG is a Swiss holding company based in Zug. Our model: partnering with founder-led independent wealth managers across the DACH region, helping them scale — organically and non-organically — and providing shared technology infrastructure. We are the long-term partner for future-ready wealth managers.

The Team

Christopher Kraft has accompanied numerous IWM transitions as an investment banker at Perella Weinberg Partners and in leading European wealth platforms. Felix Lobkowicz is a repeat founder — five companies, one IPO — and leads product and technology at Thrivo. Finn Weise leads capital and governance with over a decade of experience building fintechs and financial platforms, previously at Morgan Stanley and European VC funds. On the board: Sebastian Henrichs, former CEO of FNZ Bank Germany — the leading wealth platform in the industry.

Behind Thrivo

Thrivo is backed by a circle of investors from the finance and fintech world — experienced operators, entrepreneurs, and family offices who understand this market and think long-term. A platform that promises long-term thinking to founders cannot itself be optimising for short-term returns.

The wealth management market in Germany and Switzerland is digitising — more slowly than other sectors, but with real momentum now. Thrivo is building the technology infrastructure that underpins this transformation: a platform for founder-led wealth managers that deploys compliance automation, AI-assisted processes, and modern data architecture in a way that until now has only been available to large institutions.

ThrivoOS is not another fintech dashboard. It is the operating system for a growing group of partner firms collectively managing several billion AUM. You build this — as the first technical full-time hire and the engineering lead.

The Role

You own the technical leadership of ThrivoOS. You set the architecture, coordinate the freelance senior engineer, and are the engineering constant in a project that bridges complex regulatory requirements — MiFID II, WpHG, BaFin — with modern AI infrastructure.

You work directly with Felix Lobkowicz (CTO-in-function) on product vision and technical direction. The most important architectural decisions are yours. The architecture and stack have not been finalised — you will define them together with Felix and Tech advisors based on your experience and what is right for the platform.

This is one of the few roles in DACH fintech where technical depth, genuine entrepreneurial ownership, and real equity participation come together.

What you own

Architecture & Infrastructure

– Design and build an event-sourced backend architecture — the structural foundation for regulatory-grade auditability under MiFID II and BaFin requirements

– Multi-tenant data architecture: one platform, many partner firms, strict data isolation and RBAC

– Batch data ingest pipeline from partner firm systems (custodian banks, PMS) — the Phase 1 data foundation

– Cloud infrastructure on AWS (Frankfurt region) — we use hyperscaler-grade tooling from day one

Workflows & AI

– Advisory workflow engine — regulated advisory processes as structured, automated flows with compliance write-back (Jahresgespräch, KYC/AML as Phase 1 scope)

– AI integration: automated meeting briefings, Gesprächsprotokoll generation, and document assembly for advisors via Gemini/RAG pipeline

– Compliance infrastructure: PII anonymisation before any LLM call, encryption at rest, consent management — structural, not bolt-on

Team & culture

– Coordinate the freelance senior full-stack engineer: architectural decisions, code quality, mutual peer review

– Technical point of contact for the product advisor and design partner advisors during pilot deployment

– Set the engineering culture from day one — we use agentic coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code) as standard. We cover the cost.

What Thrivo offers

Real equity participation

Thrivo offers a VSOP participation in the Holding. Structure and terms in conversation.

Ownership from day one

As the founding engineer, you set architecture standards and engineering practices the team will carry for years. You are not executing tickets — you are building the platform.

First-class team

Direct collaboration with Felix Lobkowicz (5 consumer companies founded, one through IPO), Christopher Kraft (Perella Weinberg Partners, 50+ IWM transactions), Finn Weise (Morgan Stanley, VC) and Sebastian Henrichs (former CEO FNZ Bank Germany).

Compensation

We offer a competitive base salary and a meaningful VSOP participation in the Holding. Structure and exact terms in conversation.

What you bring

Requirements

– 5–8+ years of backend engineering in production systems — the right profile depends on depth of architecture experience, not years alone

– Event Sourcing and CQRS in practice — you have built it, not just read about it

– Domain-Driven Design — bounded contexts, aggregates, domain events

– PostgreSQL — schema design, query optimisation, pgvector

– AWS or comparable hyperscaler — production deployment, IAM, VPC, managed services

– Experience in regulated environments — fintech, banking, or insurance

– Senior enough to make architectural decisions independently and coordinate a freelance engineer

– CET timezone — daily overlap for peer review and fast alignment is required

What interests us additionally

– Go, TypeScript, or Java — we care about architecture patterns (Event Sourcing, CQRS, DDD), not the language on your CV. Experience with Go or willingness to work in Go is a plus.

– Familiarity with MiFID II, WpIG, or FINMA regulatory requirements

– Experience with graph-based workflow engines or saga patterns

– German is a plus, not a requirement

Who you are

You have proven you can build complex systems. But you are not looking for the next job at a scale-up with 200 engineers where your work disappears into a microservice pipeline. You want to set the architecture, own the platform, and know that what you build is in production and making a real difference.

An early stage does not put you off — it attracts you, because you know the most important decisions are being made now. And you understand that equity in a platform that is positioning to be the market leader in a structurally underserved segment can be worth more than the next salary band.