Founding Engineer

About the Role

A fast-growing pre-seed cleantech startup in Munich is hiring its first engineering hire — a Founding Engineer who will work directly alongside the CTO to build and operate live systems that steer industrial energy assets and trade on short-term electricity markets.

This is a highly cross-functional, end-to-end role sitting at the intersection of cloud infrastructure , electricity market integrations , and machine learning . You will be central to delivering reliable 24/7 operations for customers in the industrial electrification space — helping heavy industry transition away from fossil fuels by leveraging AI-driven Power-to-Heat optimization and smart electricity market participation.

The company operates in the industrial energy / cleantech sector and uses proprietary AI algorithms to forecast revenue opportunities and automate cross-market trading strategies for Power-to-Heat assets, reducing both costs and CO₂ emissions for industrial clients.

What You'll Do

• Operate and maintain a reliable cloud infrastructure enabling 24/7 asset steering and high-frequency trading with high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability.

• Develop and improve interfaces to electricity markets (Day-ahead, Intraday, Control power) and hardware steering systems.

• Expand and maintain a backtesting environment to support customer configurations, new trading algorithms, and new asset types.

• Train, deploy, and monitor electricity trading models in production .

• Within your first quarter: build a new asset type into the backtesting environment and design the cloud architecture for live operations.

• Rapidly internalize customer needs and translate them into robust, production-grade technical solutions.

What We're Looking For

Required:

• Strong fundamentals in computer science, mathematics, or physics — ideally from a top university background.

• Proven track record shipping production code ; hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (ideally AWS ) and Python .

• Experience designing and operating cloud systems for 24/7 live operations .

• Hands-on experience building or maintaining backtesting environments for trading algorithms and varied asset types.

• Familiarity with electricity markets and the ability to design reliable market interfaces.

• Ability to own workstreams end-to-end, deliver high-quality results independently, and escalate issues early.

• Fluent in English ; based in Munich or willing to work on-site in Munich most of the time.

Nice to Have:

• Optimization and data-science experience: MILP, stochastic methods, RNNs, Reinforcement Learning.

• Time-series forecasting in production environments.

• Energy / climate-tech domain knowledge.

• Fluent German.

The right mindset is valued over ticking every box — we encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every listed qualification.

Location

• On-site in Munich, Germany (most of the time).

• Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must have the right to work in Germany.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $70,000 – $95,000 per year (USD equivalent).

• Founding team equity participation typical of a pre-seed engineering hire.

• High-impact role with direct influence over technical architecture and product direction from day one.

• Work on meaningful problems at the frontier of industrial decarbonization and energy markets.