Founding Engineer, NLP Systems & Infrastructure

ABOUT THE ROLE As the first technical hire at an early-stage AI infrastructure company, you will turn a research-grade prototype into a reliable production system for enterprise and public-sector users. You will begin hands-on, own the engineering direction, and grow into building and leading the engineering team. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Architect and build production data and NLP pipelines, AI/ML integrations, CI/CD, observability, and cloud or on-premises deployment options. - Own the engineering roadmap while balancing delivery speed, quality, and security. - Build and validate the first production release, including infrastructure and security design decisions. - Set engineering standards, guide technical direction, and hire and manage an engineering team as the company grows. - Work closely with founders and users to iterate on the product. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - At least 5 years of experience building and operating production data-intensive or NLP systems, including ingestion, deduplication, entity resolution, queues, and orchestrated pipelines. - Strong Python skills and production engineering practices, including automated testing, CI/CD, and monitoring for data and 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 analyst-facing interfaces with React, Vue, or similar technologies. - Experience owning production architecture and deployment across cloud and on-premises environments. - Willingness and eligibility to obtain a security clearance; experience with web data acquisition, customer-hosted deployment, or German is helpful. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Salary range: €60,000 to €120,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available. LOCATION On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.