Founding Design Engineer

About the Role

A fast-growing, Y Combinator-backed B2B SaaS startup in Munich is hiring its first Founding Design Engineer. This is a rare opportunity to own the full design and front-end experience of an AI-first product — from concept through production — working directly alongside the CPO and a tight-knit engineering team. You'll shape not just the product, but the culture, processes, and technical direction of the company from day one.

The product automates complex inside-sales workflows — including quote generation and order management — for distributors and manufacturers. Interfaces must be intuitive for non-technical users while handling deeply structured, data-heavy processes.

What You'll Do

• Own the visual design, interaction design, and front-end implementation of core product features end-to-end.
• Collaborate closely with the CPO and engineers to create clean, intuitive interfaces for non-technical B2B users.
• Speak directly with customers to uncover problems and translate findings into requirements and interface designs.
• Build rapid prototypes using AI tools and code to validate product hypotheses with real users.
• Design and implement AI-first interfaces that simplify complex workflows such as RFQ parsing, product matching, and quote generation.
• Ship production-quality front-end code and work hand-in-hand with engineers to deliver features.
• Contribute as an early team member to shape company culture, processes, and product direction.

What We're Looking For

• 2–5 years of experience as a design engineer, product designer, or frontend engineer with a strong portfolio in AI and complex B2B SaaS.
• Proven ability to conduct customer-facing research and synthesize findings into product requirements and designs.
• Experience designing systems to parse and extract structured data from unstructured inputs (PDFs, emails, spreadsheets) for quote generation workflows.
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning techniques and experience contributing to or designing a product-matching engine.
• High proficiency with AI-assisted tools (e.g., Lovable, Cursor, Claude) and rapid design/prototyping in Figma.
• Comfortable shipping production code in React, TypeScript, and Python.
• Fluent in both German and English.
• Thrives in a fast-paced startup environment; comfortable with ambiguity, ownership, and rapid iteration.
• Willing to work in-person from the Munich office (or open to relocation).

Location & Work Arrangement

This role is on-site in Munich, Germany. Candidates must be willing to work from the Munich office full-time. Relocation is welcome. Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must already have the right to work in Germany.

About the Company

This is a seed-stage, Y Combinator alumni startup building AI-powered automation for B2B sales workflows in the industrial distribution and manufacturing space. The platform integrates with ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle, is GDPR-compliant, and is certified to enterprise security standards. The team is growing quickly and looking for founding-team caliber people who want to build something meaningful from the ground up.