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.