Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding-team engineering role at an early-stage B2B AI startup in the construction technology space, sitting at the intersection of engineering and customer success. You'll own AI automation use cases end-to-end — from understanding enterprise customer problems to shipping production-ready solutions — with real influence over product direction and company trajectory from day one.

What You'll Do

• Own new AI automation use cases end-to-end, from customer discovery through production deployment.

• Turn ambiguous customer problems into scoped, buildable solutions and ship them within weeks.

• Build with modern applied AI — LLMs, agentic workflows, vision models, embeddings, and heuristics — to solve high-impact enterprise problems.

• Design and implement data pipelines for document ingestion, extraction, validation, and orchestration.

• Identify recurring patterns across projects and codify them into reusable templates.

• Work directly with enterprise stakeholders on-site to gather requirements and validate solutions.

• Help shape the technical direction of both the product and the company.

What We're Looking For

• 2+ 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 — formal degree or clearly equivalent grounding.

• Full-stack capability: backend API development (Node.js/TypeScript or Python) and frontend (TypeScript/React or similar).

• Experience designing data pipelines for document processing, extraction, and validation with unstructured data (PDFs, images, documents).

• Experience integrating multiple LLM providers (e.g. OpenAI, Azure, Gemini, Cohere) and solid prompt engineering skills.

• Familiarity with vector databases, semantic search, or knowledge graphs is a plus.

• Prior B2B experience, ideally in a customer-facing or requirements-gathering capacity.

• Background in early-stage startups or founding teams; comfortable with ambiguity and rapid iteration.

• C1+ German language proficiency — this role involves direct engagement with German enterprise stakeholders.

• Pragmatic, action-oriented, and excited about applied AI over pure theory.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: €72,000 – €100,000 per year. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Location

On-site, five days per week in Berlin, Germany, with occasional travel to customer sites. Candidates must be based in Berlin or willing to relocate.