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.