Technical Co-Founder

About the Role

A pre-seed AI SaaS startup is looking for a Technical Co-Founder to join as the third member of the founding team. The company is building an AI-powered platform that automates the end-to-end process of public procurement and tender participation for architectural and planning offices in the DACH region - from tender discovery and requirements analysis through to GDPR-compliant, auto-generated proposal documents.

This is a true co-founder role: you will own the full technical implementation, help shape company strategy, and have a direct impact on market adoption and growth from day one.
What You'll Do

• Design and build a GDPR-compliant system architecture hosted in the EU (e.g., on AWS Bedrock or Vertex AI in Frankfurt or equivalent EU regions).
• Build the core AI engine that generates complete, compelling proposal concepts from client data.
• Develop and maintain a reference database for project references, certificates, and CVs, and integrate them intelligently into generated documents.
• Implement entity resolution, reliability scoring, and confidence quantification across the data pipeline.
• Work deeply in AI/ML (LLMs, RAG, NLP) and/or broadly across product engineering, depending on your strengths.
• Define and drive technical priorities alongside the founding team during the pre-seed phase.
• Contribute to product strategy, architecture decisions, and business development as a full founding team member.

What We're Looking For

Must-haves (dealbreakers):

• 5+ years of experience in product/engineering roles delivering AI-powered software with LLM, NLP, or RAG capabilities.
• Hands-on experience designing GDPR-compliant architectures in EU cloud environments (e.g., data handling for NLP/LLMs).
• Prior experience as a technical founder or technical lead building an AI-first product from zero, with full end-to-end ownership.

Required:

• Strong experience with LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and NLP integration in production systems.
• Full-stack development capability - you can ship production-ready features across the stack for an AI-enabled product.
• Genuine founder mentality: you want to build a company, not just execute tickets.
• Willingness to join with 15-20% equity and a standard four-year vesting schedule (one-year cliff), with compensation initially weighted heavily toward equity during the pre-seed phase.
• German language proficiency (written and spoken) - essential for this market.

Nice to have:

• Experience with enterprise data pipelines and secure data handling in EU cloud environments (AWS Bedrock, Vertex AI, or similar).
• Familiarity with German procurement law or the broader public sector / RegTech space (e.g., VgV, HOAI).
• A pragmatic, ship-first working style - you value progress over perfection.

Compensation & Equity

• Equity: 15-20% co-founder equity with a four-year vesting schedule and one-year cliff.
• Cash compensation: Pre-seed stage; initially weighted toward equity. Cash salary will grow as funding is secured.
• No visa sponsorship available.

Location

Preferred: Berlin, Germany (on-site / hybrid). Remote within the DACH region may be considered for the right candidate.