Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a founding-team engineering role at a construction technology AI startup, sitting at the intersection of engineering and customer success. You will own new AI automation use cases end-to-end, from discovery with enterprise stakeholders through production deployment, and have real influence over what gets built and how the company scales. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own AI automation use cases end-to-end, from customer discovery through production deployment. - Turn ambiguous enterprise customer problems into scoped, buildable solutions and ship them quickly. - Build with modern applied AI including LLMs, agentic workflows, vision models, and embeddings. - Design and implement data pipelines for document ingestion, extraction, validation, and orchestration. - Identify recurring patterns across projects and codify them into reusable templates. - Balance speed, accuracy, and pragmatism, keeping humans in the loop where appropriate. - Travel to customer sites and work directly with German enterprise stakeholders. - Help shape the technical direction of both product and company as an early hire. 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, from a degree or clearly equivalent formal grounding. - 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 workflows. - Comfortable working with unstructured data (PDFs, images, documents), vector databases, and semantic search. - Experience integrating multiple LLM providers (such as OpenAI, Azure, Gemini, or Cohere) and solid prompt engineering skills. - B2B experience, ideally in a customer-facing technical role with direct enterprise engagement. - Experience in an early-stage startup or founding team environment. - C1-level German proficiency or above (required for enterprise customer interaction and on-site visits). - Bonus: familiarity with domain ontologies, knowledge graphs, or construction industry workflows. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Salary range: 72,000 to 100,000 EUR annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. LOCATION On-site, 5 days per week in Berlin, Germany, with occasional travel to customer sites across the region.