Founding Engineer, NLP Systems & Infrastructure

About the Role This is a first engineering hire at a deep-tech startup building graph-native infrastructure for narrative intelligence, serving media organisations, public-sector bodies, and corporations facing information-manipulation threats. You will take a research-grade prototype to production and, shortly after, build and lead the engineering team that grows alongside the product. What You'll Do Own the production architecture end-to-end: orchestrated data and NLP pipelines, AI/ML integrations, CI/CD, observability, and deployment options spanning cloud and on-premises environments. Drive the engineering roadmap, balancing speed, quality, and security requirements for enterprise and public-sector customers. Develop the first production slice hands-on and validate infrastructure and security design decisions directly. Hire, build, and manage a high-performing engineering team as the company scales. Set architecture direction, enforce engineering standards, and foster a healthy team culture as the technical leader. Collaborate closely with the founders and users in a fast-moving, tight-knit on-site team. What We're Looking For Strong Python skills with production-quality habits: automated testing, CI/CD, and observability including data and model drift monitoring. Proven experience building and operating data-intensive or NLP systems in production: ingestion, deduplication, entity resolution, async queue processing, and orchestrated pipelines (Dagster, Prefect, Airflow, Temporal, or similar). Solid experience with PostgreSQL and at least one of: graph databases, vector stores, or search engines. Comfortable with embeddings, vector search, and integrating language models while managing cost, versioning, and non-determinism. Able to work across the full stack when needed, including building clean APIs and functional analyst-facing UIs (React, Vue, or similar). Willing and eligible to obtain a security clearance. Prior experience at an early-stage startup. German language skills (spoken and written). Bonus: experience acquiring and ingesting discourse data from platforms and the open web at scale, with awareness of the legal and ethical constraints involved. Bonus: experience packaging systems for customer-hosted deployment (Docker, Kubernetes/Helm). Compensation & Benefits Salary range: 60,000 to 120,000 EUR annually, depending on experience. Visa sponsorship is available. Location On-site in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.