Founding Engineer, NLP Systems & Infrastructure

About the Role Join an early-stage AI infrastructure team as its first technical hire, turning a research-grade prototype into a reliable product for enterprise and public-sector users. You will shape the production platform, work hands-on across the stack, and grow into building and leading the engineering team. What You'll Do Design and own the production architecture, including data and NLP pipelines, AI/ML integrations, CI/CD, observability, and cloud or on-premises deployment. Build and validate the first production-ready product slice, making practical decisions about infrastructure, security, quality, and delivery speed. Set the engineering roadmap and establish architecture direction, standards, and a positive team culture. Work closely with founders and users, iterating on product needs and technical priorities. Hire and manage an engineering team as the organization grows. 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 production engineering experience with automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and monitoring for data or model drift. Experience with PostgreSQL and at least one graph database, vector store, or search engine. Practical experience with embeddings, vector search, and language model integration, including cost, versioning, and non-determinism considerations. Ability to build clean APIs and functional analyst-facing interfaces using React, Vue, or a similar framework. Experience owning production systems across cloud and on-premises deployment, and willingness and eligibility to obtain a security clearance. Docker, Kubernetes or Helm, large-scale collection of online discourse data, and German language skills are useful additions. Compensation & Benefits Salary range: EUR 60,000 to EUR 120,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available. Location On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.