Founding Engineer

About the Role

An early-stage AI-native procurement SaaS startup based in Berlin is looking for a Founding Engineer to join its founding product team. You'll help build an AI-first platform that connects procurement and category managers to real-time supplier data and enterprise systems. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role: you'll shape the product, the architecture, and the engineering culture from the ground up — shipping daily and iterating directly with customers.

This is an on-site role in Berlin. No visa sponsorship is available — candidates must be eligible to work in Germany without employer sponsorship.

What You'll Do

• Own core product areas end-to-end, from AI agent orchestration to the interfaces that category managers use daily.
• Design reliable LLM workflows with evaluation loops, guardrails, and observability that hold up in production.
• Build real-time supplier data pipelines, normalization layers, and integrations with enterprise ERP systems.
• Ship to production continuously and collaborate directly with customers to iterate based on real feedback.
• Make architectural decisions across the full stack, balancing performance, security, and developer experience.
• Define engineering culture, tooling, and processes as the team grows.
• Contribute to the product roadmap and work closely with founders on major technical decisions.
• Mentor teammates and grow into an engineering leadership path as the company scales.

What We're Looking For

Required skills & experience:

• Strong full-stack foundation with attention to both interfaces and back-ends, and the seam between them.
• Proficiency in TypeScript (front-end and back-end) and Python; experience with Next.js and modern APIs.
• Hands-on experience building SaaS products end-to-end in a startup environment.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, retrieval, and embeddings, including trade-off reasoning around latency, cost, and quality.
• Proven ability to design and operate production-grade AI/ML workflows with monitoring and safety guardrails.
• Experience building data pipelines, normalization, and integrations with enterprise systems.
• Domain knowledge in ERP, procurement, or related enterprise software.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; comfortable working directly with customers and cross-functional teams.
• Ownership mindset — thrives in ambiguity, defines what to build as well as how to build it, and defaults to shipping and learning fast.

Nice to have:

• Specific experience in procurement technology or supply chain platforms.
• Background in founding-team or seed-stage environments.

Location

• Berlin, Germany — on-site
• Visa sponsorship is not available; applicants must have existing eligibility to work in Germany.