Founding Product Engineer

About the Role

A well-funded early-stage energy intelligence startup based in Munich, Germany is looking for a Founding Product Engineer to join a small, ambitious team building an enterprise-grade energy procurement and portfolio optimization platform. You'll work directly with founders and customers to shape the product from the ground up — owning features end-to-end across backend, frontend, and data/ML layers.

This is a rare opportunity for a generalist engineer with a product mindset to have outsized impact in a fast-growing B2B SaaS company operating at the intersection of energy markets, AI, and optimization.

What You'll Do

• Own the full product lifecycle — from design and requirements to deployment and iteration.
• Translate product objectives into concrete requirements through close collaboration with customers.
• Design simple, iterative solutions to complex energy procurement and portfolio problems.
• Build performant backend services for a data-intensive application.
• Develop intuitive, elegant UIs for a complex decision-support system.
• Train time-series forecasting models for power consumption and renewables production.
• Develop linear optimization algorithms to reduce customer energy costs.
• Help shape and evolve the core tech stack (PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React, Python).

What We're Looking For

• 2+ years of software engineering experience delivering scalable web applications in an early-stage startup environment — required.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver full product features independently, in close collaboration with customers — required.
• Strong fundamentals in building robust, maintainable, and scalable web applications.
• Experience building backend services for data-intensive applications.
• Experience building frontend UIs for complex decision-support or data-heavy products.
• Hands-on experience or strong interest in time-series forecasting and/or linear optimization — strongly preferred.
• Comfortable working across the full stack; familiarity with PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React, and Python is a plus.
• Experience with FastAPI or Supabase is welcome but not required.
• Background as a startup founder, early engineer, or former CTO is a strong plus.
• Genuine curiosity for energy markets and complex, data-driven business problems.
• Thrives in ambiguity, moves fast, and takes ownership without hand-holding.

Location

This role is on-site in Munich, Germany the majority of the week, with occasional flexibility for remote work. Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must already have the right to work in Germany.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary range: €85,000 – €140,000 annually (or USD equivalent), depending on experience.
• Early-stage equity opportunity commensurate with a founding team member role.
• Opportunity to shape the product, culture, and technical direction of a high-growth startup.