Founding 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 Founding Engineer to help us define and build the next generation of AI-powered logistics systems. 🧠 What You'll Do You will help turn vision into product and bring our first AI agents into the hands of real users. This is a high-ownership role, working closely with the founding team and customers to build something truly new. You'll operate across the full stack—talking to customers one hour and debugging an agent loop the next—making the foundational technical decisions that define what the product becomes. • Talk directly to customers and translate their needs into product direction and system architecture • Build full-stack features that combine intuitive interfaces with intelligent backend logic, including LLM orchestration, agent workflows, and structured data pipelines • Push the limits of what LLMs and agents can do in production, working through the hard problems of reliability, latency, and evaluation • Scale from demo-quality code to robust, production-ready systems, making deliberate tradeoffs between speed and durability as the product matures • Help shape the technical vision and product strategy of the company 👤 You Might Be a Fit If You... • Have experience taking full ownership of technical projects, from architecture through to delivery and iteration • Are pragmatic and fast in the early days, but know when to raise the bar for scale and quality • Love writing and shipping code, and are not afraid to throw it away when the problem shifts • Enjoy speaking with users and iterating quickly based on feedback, treating customer insight as a core input to engineering decisions • Want to build something ambitious and impactful, from the very beginning 🛠 What You Bring • Strong skills in Node.js, TypeScript, and React, with an instinct for patterns that move fast without creating debt—clean service boundaries, event-driven architectures, thin abstractions that are easy to replace • Experience with distributed systems and serverless infrastructure that handle concurrency, failure, and scale • Hands-on MongoDB experience, including schema design that balances query performance with flexibility • Familiarity with observability tooling, ideally Datadog—tracing across async workflows, using metrics to debug production issues, not just monitor them • Experience with modern AI tooling: LLMs, vector stores, embedding pipelines, prompt engineering • Practical understanding of LLM-powered features in production—eval frameworks, structured output parsing, context window management, error recovery • A track record of shipping products that create real value • Curiosity for how industries work and a drive to improve them through software • High-agency mindset and the ability to operate independently in a fast-changing environment 📍 Location & Logistics • In-person Monday to Wednesday in our Berlin office (travel within Europe expected) • 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 access to real users and fast feedback loops • A highly experienced team with full trust and autonomy • The opportunity to shape the foundations of a company and product from day one • 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.