Founding Engineer (gn) @ Maritime Defence Technology, Germany

Founding Engineer -- Maritime Defence Technology

Europe needs new maritime capabilities. Europe's security, energy infrastructure, and economic resilience increasingly depend on what happens at sea. Yet vast areas of the maritime domain remain difficult to monitor, understand, and operate within. Critical infrastructure spans thousands of kilometres. Underwater environments remain data-poor, communications are constrained, and many existing systems were designed for a different era.

At the same time, advances in AI, autonomy, sensing, edge computing, and hardware are making entirely new approaches possible. We're building a new defence technology company around a simple belief: the next generation of maritime and subsea capabilities will be built with software, intelligent systems, and modern hardware at their core. We're assembling the founding team and looking for a Founding Engineer to help create the technology from day one.

The Opportunity

This is not a role maintaining an existing product. There is no engineering organisation, no inherited architecture, and no years of accumulated technical debt. The opportunity is to help build a company from first principles around one of the most important and underexplored areas in European defence technology.

You'll work directly with the founder and Atlantic.vc to turn a thesis into deployed capability. From the earliest technical decisions through to field testing and customer feedback, you'll help shape both the product and the engineering culture of the company. This is a chance to have disproportionate influence on what gets built and how it's built.

What You'll Build

The exact product will be shaped by the founding team, but you'll work across some combination of:

• Maritime and subsea systems
• Autonomous platforms and intelligent software
• AI and machine learning at the edge
• Sensor fusion, perception, and situational awareness
• Navigation and localisation in constrained environments
• Mission software and operator interfaces
• Data infrastructure and software platforms
• Hardware-software integration and deployment

This is a role for engineers who enjoy operating across disciplines. You'll move between software, systems, hardware, testing, deployment, and customer requirements as the company evolves.

Who You Are

You're an exceptional builder. You may come from robotics, autonomy, aerospace, maritime technology, defence technology, machine learning, embedded systems, or another deep technical field. What matters most is that you've built difficult systems and made them work outside controlled environments.

You likely have experience in some combination of:

• Python, C++, Rust, or similar languages
• Robotics and autonomous systems
• Machine learning and AI
• Computer vision and perception
• Sensor fusion and localisation
• Embedded or edge computing
• Distributed systems
• Hardware-software integration

You don't need experience across all of these areas. You do need strong engineering judgement, intellectual curiosity, and a willingness to solve problems wherever they appear. Most importantly, you're excited by ownership. You want to help create something from the beginning, not join once it's already been built.

What We Offer

• Meaningful equity ownership from day one
• The opportunity to help build a company from inception
• Direct collaboration with the founder and founding team
• Backing from Atlantic.vc
• Freedom to work on important technical problems without layers of bureaucracy
• The chance to build technology that matters for European security and resilience

Location

We'd like the founding team to spend meaningful time together in Berlin during the earliest stages of company formation. Long term, we're open-minded about where the company should be headquartered and built, provided the location offers the strongest access to customers, talent, and strategic partners.

What This Is Not

This is not a typical engineering role. We're not looking for someone to join a finished company. We're looking for someone who wants to help create one. If you're motivated by difficult technical challenges, real ownership, and the opportunity to build something enduring from the ground up, we'd love to talk.