Founding Engineer, NLP Systems and Infrastructure

About the Role Join an early-stage AI and dual-use technology company as its first technical hire. You will turn a research-grade prototype into reliable production software for enterprise and public-sector users, with broad ownership and the opportunity to build an engineering team. What You'll Do Architect production systems spanning orchestrated data and NLP pipelines, AI/ML integrations, CI/CD, observability, and cloud or on-premises deployment. Set and own the engineering roadmap, balancing delivery speed, quality, and security. Build and validate the first production release hands-on, including infrastructure and security decisions. Hire and lead an engineering team while setting technical direction, engineering standards, and a positive team culture. Work closely with company leadership and users to iterate on the product. 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 practices, including automated testing, CI/CD, and monitoring for data and model drift. Experience with PostgreSQL and at least one graph database, vector store, or search engine, plus embeddings, vector search, and language model integrations. Experience managing language model costs, versioning, and non-deterministic behavior. Ability to build clean APIs and functional analyst-facing interfaces using React, Vue, or similar technologies. Experience owning production architecture, observability, and cloud and on-premises deployment options. Docker, Kubernetes, or Helm experience is useful. Open-web or platform data acquisition experience and awareness of related legal and ethical considerations are valued. Willingness and eligibility to obtain a security clearance in the near future. German language skills and early-stage startup experience are helpful. Compensation & Benefits Base salary: €60,000 to €120,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available. Location On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.