Founding Engineer, NLP Systems & Infrastructure

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Design and own the production system architecture, covering orchestrated data and NLP pipelines, AI/ML integrations, CI/CD, observability, and both cloud and on-premises deployment
• ▹Own the engineering roadmap, balancing speed, quality and security across a fast-moving product cycle
• ▹Build the first production slice entirely hands-on and validate infrastructure and security design decisions
• ▹Hire and manage a high-performing engineering team shortly after joining, taking on full staff responsibility
• ▹Set architecture direction, enforce engineering standards and foster a positive team culture as the technical leader
• ▹Iterate closely with the founding team and end users in a tight-knit on-site team

Requirements

• ▹5+ years building and operating data-intensive or NLP systems in production, including ingestion, deduplication, entity resolution, async queue processing and orchestrated pipelines (Dagster, Prefect, Airflow, Temporal or similar)
• ▹Python as primary language with strong production engineering habits: automated testing, CI/CD and observability including data and model-drift monitoring
• ▹Experience with PostgreSQL and at least one of: graph databases, vector stores or search engines
• ▹Comfort with embeddings, vector search and integrating language models while managing cost, versioning and non-determinism
• ▹Ability to build clean APIs and functional analyst-facing UIs (React, Vue or similar)
• ▹Prior experience leading engineering at an early-stage technology company while remaining hands-on in delivery
• ▹Willingness and eligibility to obtain a security clearance in the near future

Nice to have

• ▹Experience acquiring and ingesting web-scale discourse data (APIs, researcher access programmes, crawling) with awareness of legal and ethical constraints
• ▹Experience packaging systems for customer-hosted deployment using Docker, Kubernetes or Helm
• ▹German language proficiency

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Salary range of 60,000 to 120,000 EUR annually, depending on experience
• ▹Significant early equity ownership given founding-team seniority
• ▹Visa sponsorship

About the company

An early-stage deep-tech startup building graph-native infrastructure for narrative intelligence, serving media organisations, government actors and corporations facing information-manipulation threats.