Founding Engineer, NLP Systems & Infrastructure

About the Role

Join an early-stage dual-use AI company as its first technical hire, turning a research-grade prototype into dependable production software for enterprise and public-sector users. You will begin as a hands-on builder with broad technical ownership, then grow the engineering team and take on people leadership.

What You'll Do

• Design and own production architecture for data and NLP pipelines, AI/ML integrations, CI/CD, observability, and cloud or on-premises deployments.
• Set the engineering roadmap and balance delivery speed with quality and security.
• Build and validate the first production release, including infrastructure and security decisions.
• Hire and lead an engineering team, set technical standards, and support a positive team culture.
• Work closely with founders and users to iterate on the product.

What We're Looking For

• At least 5 years building and operating production data-intensive or NLP systems, including ingestion, deduplication, entity resolution, queues, and orchestrated pipelines.
• Strong Python skills and experience with automated testing, CI/CD, and observability, including monitoring data or model drift.
• Experience with PostgreSQL and a graph database, vector store, or search engine, plus embeddings, vector search, and language model integrations.
• Ability to build clean APIs and functional analyst-facing interfaces using React, Vue, or a similar framework.
• Experience architecting production systems for cloud and on-premises deployment. Docker, Kubernetes, or Helm experience is an advantage.
• Willingness and eligibility to obtain German security clearance. Eligibility is subject to German requirements, including nationality restrictions under §13 SÜG.
• Experience with open-web or platform data, early-stage startups, German language, or public-sector and dual-use technology is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary

€60,000 to €120,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.