Founding Product Engineer

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.