Founding Engineer
Job description
About the Role
This is a rare opportunity to join a small, high-conviction team building purpose-built AI agents for the sea and air freight industry. As a Founding Engineer, you will sit at the intersection of customer discovery, product strategy, and hands-on engineering. You'll help transition the product from demo-stage to a scalable, production-grade platform — and play a direct role in shaping the company's technical and strategic direction from the ground up.
The company is an early-stage B2B SaaS startup in the freight and logistics technology space, developing an AI operating system that automates operational workflows — such as rate requests, bookings, and exception handling — for top-tier freight forwarders. The platform integrates with existing industry systems and continuously improves with every shipment processed.
Work arrangement: Hybrid — Berlin, Germany. Visa sponsorship is available.
What You'll Do
Lead customer conversations, deeply understand user pain points, and translate insights into concrete product features and technical strategy.
Design, build, and ship full-stack applications across the entire product surface area.
Advance the product's AI capabilities — including LLM integrations, agent orchestration, and data pipelines.
Drive the transition from MVP and demo-mode to scalable, high-quality production systems.
Contribute to shaping product direction, engineering culture, and company strategy as an early team member.
What We're Looking For
Must-haves:
2+ years of software engineering experience.
Full-stack development proficiency: Node.js, TypeScript, and React on the frontend/backend; Python for backend and ML-adjacent work.
Hands-on experience with LLM design patterns, vector stores, and model fine-tuning.
Proven track record designing, building, and deploying scalable products from MVP through production.
Comfort leading customer conversations and distilling feedback into clear product requirements.
Experience working in a startup or early-stage environment — you thrive with autonomy and ambiguity.
Nice to have:
Familiarity with the freight forwarding or broader logistics technology space.
Experience integrating with enterprise systems (e.g. ERP, TMS, or carrier portals).
Background at a high-calibre technology, consulting, or logistics-tech company.
Compensation & Benefits
Compensation details are not publicly listed for this role. Equity participation is expected given the founding-team nature of the position. Visa sponsorship is available for the right candidate.
Location
Berlin, Germany — Hybrid working arrangement. Candidates should expect a regular in-person presence at the Berlin office.
Find Jobs in Germany on Arbeitnow