Founding Engineer, NLP Systems & Infrastructure

About the Role

This is a first technical hire position at an early-stage deep-tech startup building graph-native infrastructure for narrative intelligence, serving media organisations, government actors, and corporations facing information-manipulation threats. You will take a research-grade prototype to production, own the full engineering architecture, and grow and lead the engineering team as the company scales.

What You'll Do

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.

What We're Looking For

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.

Nice to have: experience packaging systems for customer-hosted deployment using Docker, Kubernetes, or Helm.

Nice to have: German language proficiency.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: 60,000 to 120,000 EUR annually, depending on experience.

Significant early equity ownership expected given founding-team seniority.

Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. The role is based full-time at the Munich office.