Founding Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding-level engineering role at an early-stage AI startup building purpose-built automation for the sea and air freight industry. You will sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and customer success, helping take the product from demo-stage to a scalable, production-ready system that freight forwarders rely on daily. Your work will directly shape the company's technical and product direction from the ground up.

What You'll Do

• Lead customer conversations and translate insights into concrete product features and technical strategy.

• Design, build, and ship full-stack applications using Node.js, TypeScript, React, and Python.

• Push the AI capabilities of the product forward, including LLM design patterns, vector stores, and model fine-tuning.

• Transition the product from prototype and demo mode into a scalable, high-quality production system.

• Contribute to shaping the product roadmap, architecture decisions, and overall company direction.

What We're Looking For

• 2 or more years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production applications.

• Full-stack development skills: Node.js, TypeScript, and React on the frontend; Python on the backend.

• Hands-on experience with LLM design patterns, vector stores, and model fine-tuning.

• Experience designing and deploying scalable products from MVP through to production.

• Comfort leading customer conversations and turning feedback into clear product requirements.

• Strong system-design ability, including reasoning about scope, constraints, and trade-offs in a startup context.

• Experience in startup or early-stage environments, with a bias toward pragmatic, startup-appropriate architecture decisions.

• Broad product-engineering range rather than a background concentrated in a single discipline such as ML, data, or frontend.

• Bonus: experience with vector databases, semantic search, or transitioning products from prototype to production.

Location

Hybrid from Berlin, Germany. Visa sponsorship is available.