Founding Product Engineer

About the RoleThis is a founding-level product engineering role at a fast-growing, European-headquartered startup building an AI-powered phone assistant for small and medium-sized businesses. The platform automates inbound and outbound calls, appointment scheduling, customer service, and other communication workflows — with a strong focus on the German-speaking market and a privacy-first, data-sovereign architecture built in Europe. You'll join a lean, high-ownership engineering team at an early stage (recently closed a Seed / Series A round backed by prominent European and global investors) and have a direct impact on product direction, architecture, and customer outcomes. The company has grown from a handful of people to ~50 in under two years and is continuing to scale rapidly. Native-level German proficiency is a firm requirement for this role. You must be able to work with CET time-zone overlap. An optional office in Vienna, Austria is available. What You'll Do• Own features end-to-end — from hypothesis and prototype through to production release — for a product used by thousands of companies across Europe. • Lead product discovery by designing and running rapid experiments to validate ideas before committing to 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 analytics to support data-driven iteration. • Build across the full stack, driving architecture decisions through to release. • Prioritise pragmatic solutions that balance speed of validation with long-term scalability. • Take radical ownership of initiatives and move them forward autonomously, without waiting for sign-offs. What We're Looking ForMust-haves (dealbreakers): • 3+ years of product engineering experience delivering end-to-end software features. • Strong full-stack proficiency: Node.js, TypeScript, NestJS, and React. • Nativ