Founding Engineer; m​/f​/d; NLP Systems & Infrastructure

As Founding Engineer (m/w/d), you’ll join us as our first technical hire. The challenge ahead is turning a research-grade prototype into a product that enterprise and public‑sector customers can depend on. You will be trusted with significant ownership early on and wear several hats as things move fast and priorities shift. Your role will quickly expand to include hiring your own engineering team and taking on full staff responsibility.

• Own the architecture of our production system, including orchestrated data/ NLP pipelines, AI/ML integrations, CI/CD, observability, and deployment options ranging from cloud to on‑prem.
• Own the engineering roadmap, balancing speed, quality, and security.
• Develop the first production slice entirely hands‑on and validate infrastructure and security design decisions.
• Build, hire, and manage a high‑performing engineering team shortly after joining.
• Act as a technical leader by setting architecture direction, enforcing engineering standards, and fostering a positive team culture.
• Move fast and iterate closely with the founders and users in a tight‑knit Munich‑based team.

You are our ideal candidate if you are equally excited about leading an engineering team as you are about being the engineering team until additional roles are filled. It’s a perfect match if you are also a quick study with big ambitions, a lot of grit, and a fundamental drive to make a positive impact on society.

• Python is your primary language, and you bring production‑quality engineering habits: automated testing, CI/CD, and observability including monitoring for data and model drift.
• You have built and operated data‑intensive or NLP systems in production: ingestion, deduplication, entity resolution, asynchronous processing via queues, and orchestrated pipelines (Dagster, Prefect, Airflow, Temporal or similar).
• You have experience with PostgreSQL and at least one of the following: graph databases, vector stores, or search engines.
• You are comfortable with embeddings, vector search and integrating language models while managing cost, versioning and non‑determinism.
• You are comfortable working across the stack when needed: you can build a clean API and a functional analyst‑facing UI (React, Vue or similar) yourself.
• You are willing and eligible to obtain a security clearance in the near future.

• You have experience acquiring and ingesting discourse data from platforms and the open web (official APIs, researcher access programmes, crawling) at scale, and an understanding of the legal and ethical constraints that come with it.
• You have experience packaging systems for customer‑hosted deployment (Docker, Kubernetes/Helm).
• You have experience working at an early‑stage start‑up.
• You speak German.

Note:

We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all the listed qualifications; ability and impact cannot be summarised in a few bullet points.

• Compensation & Equity: A generous founding engineer VSOP package alongside a competitive salary.
• Real ownership:
  You’re engineer #1. You join at the ground floor with a real opportunity for quick advancement into leadership as the company scales.
• Flexible working hours:
  We care about outcomes, not hours tracked, and value a healthy work‑life balance.
• Workspace: A large office space located east of Munich, with regular team carpooling available from the city centre.
• Retreats:
  We have a cabin in the Austrian mountains that we regularly use for off‑sites.
• Stay active:
  
  With EGYM Wellpass, you get access to thousands of fitness and sports facilities.
• Stay mobile:
  We support you in staying environmentally mobile with bike leasing and job‑ticket offers.

We are an open-minded company…