Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

Referral bonus: If you know someone exceptional feel free to connect us via LinkedIn (Dennis Agidigbi), if we end up hiring them for a full-time role, you'll receive 10,000€. 🌍 About Zauber After co-founding and scaling Forto https://forto.com to over $600M in funding, I took a step back to reflect on what’s still broken in global logistics. The answer was clear: it’s still a human-first, spreadsheet-heavy industry, full of repetitive processes and broken system interoperability. With the rise of AI agents, we now have the tools to rethink that from the ground up. Zauber builds autonomous agents for the global logistics industry, AI workers that handle operational tasks, talk to systems and humans alike, and get better every day. 🚢 We're already live with global logistics leaders in Europe and Asia 💰 Backed by P9 - one of Europe's top early-stage funds 📈 Growing fast and hiring exceptional engineers to join early Now we are looking for an exceptional Forward Deployed Engineer https://a16z.com/services-led-growth/ to help us build with and for customers right in the field. Probably the hottest role in startups right now. 🧠 What You'll Do You'll be the bridge between customer pain and product reality. You will: • Sit with logistics teams, understand workflows, and turn chaos into clear system design • Build fast, AI-powered tools across the stack (Node.js, TypeScript) • Integrate with enterprise ecosystems (ERP, TMS, SFTP, event queues) and build solid pipelines for messy data • Shape product direction and tech decisions with the founding team • Travel with us to key accounts in Europe and Asia 👤 You Might Be a Fit If You... • Thrive in early-stage environments and take full ownership of outcomes • Write clean, fast code and love getting things into production • Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders • Are willing to work hard, to create something new and groundbreaking • Enjoy traveling and working directly with customers 🛠 What You Bring • Fluency in TypeScript/Node.js; frontend React is a plus • Experience with APIs, external integrations, and enterprise data systems • Ability to design and scale backend infrastructure • Familiarity with cloud infra (Docker, Terraform, GCP or AWS) • Bonus: experience working with GenAI/LLM architectures (RAG, evals, orchestration) 📍 Location & Logistics • Berlin office preferred, but open for hybrid setups • Annual offsite (last year we took the team for 4 weeks to San Francisco) • Start: As soon as possible 💼 What We Offer • Top-of-market compensation and meaningful early equity • Direct exposure to customers and decision-making • A small team of excellent engineers and operators with high autonomy • A mission that matters: building intelligent systems to power the future of global trade 🚀 Why Now We’re not a demo company. We’re in production with real customers, in one of the world’s most critical and complex industries. Demand is not our bottleneck, execution is. This is your chance to join extremely early, shape the company, and build what will become the core infrastructure for global logistics automation. We envision a world where every shipment is proactively managed by intelligent agents. Where operators have superhuman capabilities at their fingertips and trade never stalls. 🇪🇺 Building from Europe What drives us personally is the belief that Europe’s long-term prosperity and sovereignty depend on a strong economic engine. We need more AI product-first European global champions on the world stage. Our mission is to build one of the biggest automation companies in the world - from Europe. While our HQ will be in Europe, we will relentlessly benchmark ourselves with the best globally and sell internationally from the beginning.