Founding Engineer, NLP Systems and Infrastructure (Visa Sponsorship - Munich, Germany)

Visa sponsorship available. This is the first technical hire at an early-stage AI and dual-use technology company. You will take a research-stage prototype and turn it into dependable production software used by enterprise and public-sector customers. The role comes with broad ownership and the chance to shape and grow the engineering team from the start.

What you'll do

• Design production architecture covering orchestrated data and NLP pipelines, AI/ML integrations, CI/CD, observability, and deployment to cloud or on-premises environments.
• Define and own the engineering roadmap, balancing delivery speed, code quality, and security.
• Build and validate the first production release hands-on, including infrastructure and security decisions.
• Recruit and lead an engineering team, setting technical direction, engineering standards, and team culture.
• Work directly with company leadership and users to refine the product.

What you need

• At least 5 years building and operating production data-intensive or NLP systems, including ingestion, deduplication, entity resolution, queues, and orchestrated pipelines.
• Strong Python and production engineering practice: 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 analyst-facing interfaces in React, Vue, or similar. Docker, Kubernetes, or Helm experience is a plus.
• Willingness and eligibility to obtain a security clearance in the near future. German language skills and early-stage startup experience are helpful.

How to apply

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