Technical Co-Founder (m/w/d)

About the Role

A pre-seed B2B SaaS startup in the German public procurement (Vergabe) space is looking for a Technical Co-Founder to join as the third member of the founding team. You will build an AI-powered platform — from scratch — that helps organizations navigate public tendering processes in the DACH region. The platform is GDPR-compliant by design and leverages LLMs, RAG, and NLP to generate complete, compelling service concepts from structured office data.

This is an equity-heavy co-founder role, ideal for a builder who wants real ownership and the chance to shape both the technology and the company from day one.

What You'll Do

• Design and own the system architecture with a focus on GDPR compliance using EU-based cloud infrastructure (e.g., AWS Bedrock or Vertex AI in Frankfurt).

• Build the core AI engine that generates complete performance concepts and tender documents from structured data.

• Develop and maintain a reference database for credentials, certificates, and CVs — and integrate them dynamically into generated outputs.

• Implement entity resolution, reliability scoring, and confidence quantification across data pipelines.

• Work deeply in AI/ML (LLMs, RAG, NLP) and broadly across product engineering depending on your strengths.

• Set technical priorities and make architecture decisions in a small founding team.

• Contribute to business strategy during the pre-seed phase.

What We're Looking For

• Required: Proven track record of building a product from zero with end-to-end technical ownership.

• Required: Strong full-stack development skills with hands-on experience in backend, data, and cloud architecture (production-ready).

• Required: Hands-on experience with LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and NLP — this is the core of the product.

• Required: Experience designing GDPR-compliant architectures in EU cloud environments, particularly for NLP/LLM workloads.

• Pragmatic, delivery-focused mindset — ships working software over perfect systems.

• Genuine founder mentality: you want to build a company, not just close tickets.

• Good German language proficiency — procurement law and source documents are in German.

• Comfortable working full-time in an equity-heavy, pre-seed compensation structure.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with German public procurement law (Vergaberecht).

• Prior experience in RegTech, GovTech, or compliance-adjacent SaaS products.

• Background at or familiarity with AI-first SaaS companies.

Compensation & Equity

• Equity: 15–20% co-founder stake with a standard 4-year vesting schedule and 1-year cliff.

• Salary: Compensation is primarily equity-based in the pre-seed phase; cash compensation will grow as funding is secured (a public funding application is currently in progress).

• No visa sponsorship available.

Location

• Berlin preferred (on-site); hybrid or remote within the DACH region is negotiable.

• Cloud infrastructure is EU-based (e.g., Frankfurt).