Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding-team position at an early-stage B2B AI startup in the construction technology space, sitting at the intersection of engineering and customer success. You will own AI automation use cases end-to-end, from discovering enterprise customer problems through to shipping production-ready solutions in weeks. As a day-zero hire on a small Berlin team, you will have direct influence on product direction and how the company scales.

What You'll Do

• Own new AI automation use cases from customer discovery through production deployment on the company platform.

• Turn ambiguous enterprise problems into scoped, buildable solutions and ship them quickly.

• Build applied AI solutions using LLMs, agentic workflows, vision models, embeddings, and heuristics.

• 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, including on-site customer visits, to gather requirements and explain technical trade-offs.

• 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.

• Strong CS fundamentals, from a degree or clearly equivalent formal grounding.

• Hands-on experience deploying applied AI in production: LLMs, agentic workflows, vision models, and embeddings.

• 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 such as PDFs and images.

• 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.

• B2B experience, ideally in a customer-facing or customer success technical role.

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

• C1-level German or above, essential for working directly with German enterprise stakeholders.

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

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 region.