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
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A generation engine that turns a firm's existing data into complete, compelling performance concept documents — compliant with German procurement law (VgV, HOAI)
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A reference database with automated maintenance of references, certificates, and CVs — including entity resolution, reliability scoring, and confidence quantification
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A clean, GDPR-compliant cloud architecture hosted in the EU (AWS Frankfurt or equivalent)
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LLM/RAG pipelines that extract, structure, and reason over complex German-language procurement documents
What We're Looking For
Required:
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Strong full-stack engineering skills with a track record of shipping product-focused features end-to-end
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Hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG, and/or NLP — or a clear ability and eagerness to go deep here quickly
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Entrepreneurial mindset: you want to build a company, not just resolve tickets
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Pragmatic and delivery-oriented — ships rather than perfects endlessly
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Comfortable with the co-founder role and equity-based compensation at the early stage
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Professional-level German (procurement law, customer communication, and the product itself are in German)
Nice to have:
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Prior experience building a product from 0 to 1
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Familiarity with German public procurement law (VgV, HOAI, Leistungsphasen)
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Experience with EU data residency and GDPR-compliant SaaS architectures
Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.
Compensation & Benefits
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Equity: 15–20% co-founder stake
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Vesting: 4-year schedule with a 1-year cliff
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Salary: Introduced once funding is secured; pre-funding compensation is equity-based
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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.
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