Founding Engineer

Who are we? We are ex-Palantir team, joined YC in S24 to start Zeit AI, raised 2.7m and hired two of our first three engineers directly from Palantir. We reached high 6-figure in ARR already and are now looking for another founding engineer to join the team. What do we do? Vital insights for business decisions are never generated because most people don't know database languages, and Excel demands extensive manual effort. Zeit AI allows enterprises to access their tabular data with just a few words. Get in touch, we're always looking forward to meeting smart minds. 66% of Palantir’s workforce are data engineers customers pay $1–2M/year for — because turning enterprise data into value is hard. We’ve done this for years. Now we’re building an agent that does it 10x faster. We need your help. Role and what we mean by Founding Engineer (FE): (Early stage) The map is 80% fog. The path is not straight. You need to thrive in ambiguity. (End-to-end) Everyone does everything. Sales, design, product, customer success — you’ve touched most of these and want to own the full cycle. (Foundations) You’re laying the groundwork for the company and product, not just code. You might be more Forward-Deployed (FD FE): Own customer outcomes. Identify gaps. Deliver value. Run workshops, work side-by-side with users. Where the agent falls short, you step in — connect data, run analysis, build workflows. Bring learnings back to the product: highlight friction, design better workflows, extend the agent’s abilities. Or more Product-focused (Product FE): Build what makes customer work repeatable, scalable, efficient. Spot common pain. Prototype solutions. Ship. Validate with users. Kill solution if needed. Move the product from “zero” to “possible” to “automatic”. What we look for You’re in Munich or can be — remote doesn’t cut it at this stage. You’re fluent in TypeScript, React, and building scalable data-heavy apps (even more relevant for Product FE). You think in outcomes, not just features. You have customer empathy baked in. Why join us We're growing fast We jump between Munich and San Francisco — to run product sprints, meet investors, and stay close to the cutting edge (AI labs, founder friends, early adopters). You’ll be at the heart of agentic workflows — building not just features, but a new way of working. High equity, low politics, full ownership — your fingerprint will be all over the product and the company. Meet us first! We run three rounds, these can be all after one another. Interviews are adjusted to fit the needs of the applicant. (1) Technical Interview (2) Behavioural Interview (3) Decomposition Interview