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.