Founding Product Engineer
This is a fully remote role, open to candidates based in Germany (primary) or Austria. You should have meaningful overlap with Central European Time (CET). Visa sponsorship is not available.
Founding Product Engineer for a seed-stage AI voice startup, fully remote in Germany/Austria, requires native German and full-stack skills (Node.js, TypeScript, NestJS, React), 3+ years experience, salary €80k-120k.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We're a seed-stage AI voice communication startup headquartered in Vienna, Austria, building an AI phone assistant platform used by thousands of small and medium-sized businesses across Europe. Our product automates inbound and outbound calls, appointment scheduling, customer service inquiries, and more — with a strong focus on the German-speaking market and European data sovereignty.
As a Founding Product Engineer, you'll take end-to-end ownership of product features — from hypothesis and prototype through to production. You'll work at the intersection of engineering and product, keeping close contact with customers and partners to ship pragmatic, high-impact software fast. This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy role at a fast-growing company.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own features end-to-end: from discovery and hypothesis through architecture, implementation, and release.
- Lead product discovery by rapidly designing and running experiments to validate ideas before investing in large-scale builds.
- Maintain close, recurring contact with customers, partners, and the Sales team to surface real pain points and translate them into product decisions.
- Design and implement tracking and metrics instrumentation to support data-driven iteration.
- Build across the full stack, driving architecture decisions and owning implementation through to production.
- Balance speed of validation with long-term scalability in every solution you ship.
- Take radical ownership of initiatives — move things forward independently without waiting for sign-offs.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Must-haves (dealbreakers)
- 3+ years of experience in Product Engineering, delivering end-to-end software features.
- Strong full-stack proficiency with Node.js, TypeScript, NestJS, and React.
- Native-level German language proficiency (Deutsch auf Muttersprache-Niveau) — essential for supporting our German-language product and customer base.
Required skills
- Experience integrating software with external systems such as CRMs, calendar applications, and databases.
- Ability to gather and synthesize customer feedback into actionable product decisions, working closely with customers, partners, and sales.
- Comfort identifying, tracking, and analyzing relevant product metrics to drive data-informed decisions.
- Proven experience with the full software development lifecycle — from architecture decisions through to production release.
Nice to have
- Experience integrating AI/LLM features (e.g., OpenAI or similar) into production software.
- Familiarity with GDPR compliance and EU AI Act considerations in product development.
- Experience thriving in a remote-first, asynchronous collaboration environment.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
- Salary: €80,000 – €120,000 annually, depending on experience.
- Equity: Meaningful equity stake as an early team member.
- Remote-first setup with optional access to a Vienna office.
- High-autonomy, high-impact role at an early-stage, fast-scaling company.
LOCATION
This is a fully remote role, open to candidates based in Germany (primary) or Austria. You should have meaningful overlap with Central European Time (CET). Visa sponsorship is not available.