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
Required:
Location
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.
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.
- Optimization and data-science experience: MILP, stochastic methods, RNNs, Reinforcement Learning.
- Time-series forecasting in production environments.
- Energy / climate-tech domain knowledge.
- Fluent German.
Location
- On-site in Munich, Germany (most of the time).
- Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must have the right to work in Germany.
- 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.