Founding Staff Engineer

About the Role

A Y Combinator-backed B2B SaaS startup in the AI-powered sales automation space is looking for a Founding Staff Engineer to serve as the technical backbone of a small, fast-moving engineering organization. This is a high-ownership, hands-on role for someone who thrives in early-stage environments, writes production code every day, and naturally raises the bar for everyone around them. The company operates in the industrial distribution and manufacturing sector, building AI systems that automate quote and order workflows for enterprise customers.

What You'll Do

• Act as the senior-most technical contributor across multiple products and development streams.
• Own the most complex, highest-leverage engineering work: core systems, shared frameworks, and critical infrastructure.
• Define and evolve architecture decisions that prevent long-term dead-ends across products.
• Spend the majority of your time writing and shipping production-quality code — leading by example.
• Eliminate technical debt by refactoring abstractions and raising reliability and engineering standards.
• Mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and direct feedback to improve team output and reduce hidden risk.
• Contribute to the architecture and implementation of AI capabilities, including LLM pipelines and data infrastructure.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of solving genuinely hard technical problems in production.
• Deep full-stack expertise with strong backend, API, and infrastructure skills; comfortable on the frontend when needed (Python, React, TypeScript).
• Proven experience designing and evolving systems across multiple products and teams.
• Demonstrated ability to improve system performance, reliability, and scalability at scale.
• Cloud and DevOps fluency: containerization (Docker), cloud platforms (Azure / AWS / GCP), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Experience building or integrating AI systems, LLMs, or large-scale data pipelines is a strong plus.
• Prior founding-team or early-stage startup experience — comfortable with ambiguity, rapid iteration, and high-paced delivery.
• A natural tendency to notice and fix slipping quality without being asked.
• Mission-driven, pragmatic, and decisive under uncertainty.

Location & Work Arrangement

This role is fully on-site in Munich, Germany. Candidates must be willing to work in-person with startup intensity. Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must already be eligible to work in Germany.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation details will be discussed during the interview process. You'll be joining as a founding team member at a well-funded, early-stage company with meaningful equity upside and direct impact on company direction and technical culture.