About the Role
This is a co-founder opportunity --- not an employment contract. A pre-seed AI startup in the DACH region is automating the public tender process for architecture and engineering offices. These firms spend 3--5 unpaid working days on each of the 40--60 procurement procedures they handle annually --- up to €110,000 per year in unrecoverable time. The platform cuts that burden by 70--90%, handling everything from tender discovery and go/no-go scoring to the automated generation of complete, office-branded performance concepts (25--35 pages per application).
The founding team currently consists of two people: one covering strategy, sales, and procurement law, and one Full-Stack & AI engineer. You would be the third co-founder, taking ownership of a core technical domain alongside the existing engineer.
The product is already live with an early customer, a second pilot is in preparation, and a public funding application (IBB Berlin ProFIT) is underway. The structural market opportunity is anchored by a multi-year, €500B German federal infrastructure programme that feeds public procurement pipelines through at least 2036.
What You'll Build
- A generation engine that turns a firm's existing data into complete, compelling performance concept documents --- compliant with German procurement law (VgV, HOAI)
- A reference database with automated maintenance of references, certificates, and CVs --- including entity resolution, reliability scoring, and confidence quantification
- A clean, GDPR-compliant cloud architecture hosted in the EU (AWS Frankfurt or equivalent)
- LLM/RAG pipelines that extract, structure, and reason over complex German-language procurement documents
What We're Looking For
Required:
- Strong full-stack engineering skills with a track record of shipping product-focused features end-to-end
- Hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG, and/or NLP --- or a clear ability and eagerness to go deep here quickly
- Entrepreneurial mindset: you want to build a company, not just resolve tickets
- Pragmatic and delivery-oriented --- ships rather than perfects endlessly
- Comfortable with the co-founder role and equity-based compensation at the early stage
- Professional-level German (procurement law, customer communication, and the product itself are in German)
Nice to have:
- Prior experience building a product from 0 to 1
- Familiarity with German public procurement law (VgV, HOAI, Leistungsphasen)
- Experience with EU data residency and GDPR-compliant SaaS architectures
Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.
Compensation & Benefits
- Equity: 15--20% co-founder stake
- Vesting: 4-year schedule with a 1-year cliff
- Salary: Introduced once funding is secured; pre-funding compensation is equity-based
- Full-time commitment preferred
Location
The team is based in Berlin, Germany. Hybrid and fully remote arrangements within the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) are possible.
