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.