Forward Deployed Engineer

You are handed a problem, a customer, and the platform. Come back with something that works.

Berlin · Hybrid · Full-time · Mid to Senior · Customer Solutions · Solutions Architect

About the Position

Every deal we sign is technical. Every customer has a document problem nobody else has solved. The person who solves it sits in the room with them. That is this job. You take a customer problem from first call to running system, owning design, build, and delivery end to end.

BASE SALARY €80,000 to €90,000 / YEAR

CALIBRATED TO EXPERIENCE + MEANINGFUL EQUITY

Why this role exists

We are 13 people. We run Talonic in production for energy utilities, pharma distribution, automotive, and US logistics. The platform works. What it takes to win each account is someone who can go deep on a real, messy customer problem and come back with a system that runs.

You are not handed tickets. You are handed a problem, a customer, and the platform, and you are expected to come back with something that works. We care much more about what you can ship than what your CV says you are. Our strongest builder came to us as a product manager.

Responsibilities

• Sit in customer workshops and leave with the data model in your head. Understand a messy real-world process, contracts, invoices, scanned engineering diagrams, forty-year-old archives, and design the schema that makes it queryable.
• Design and build schemas and extraction pipelines on the Talonic platform. From data model to working extraction. You design it and you build it, not separate people.
• Build the downstream layer. Validation rules, normalization, delivery into SAP, Ivalua, Dynamics, Snowflake, whatever the customer runs. The integration is part of the job.
• Build agents and MCP integrations that put customer data to work. Prototype fast with AI tooling, then harden what survives contact with production. The prototype is not the delivery.
• Own delivery end to end and be the technical face of Talonic to the account. Enterprise stakeholders, procurement, IT security, a skeptical CFO. You can hold the room and you can explain the decision they are paying for.

Requirements

• You build constantly. You have shipped things nobody asked you to build. The instinct to make something is more important to us than the title on your CV. Show us what you’ve built.
• You are fluent with agentic coding tools and you use them as leverage, not as a crutch. You can read the code they write and you know when it is wrong. AI is how you move faster, not how you avoid understanding what you ship.
• You have real technical depth somewhere. Data modelling, backend, systems, ML, industrial process engineering. We do not care which one. We care that it is deep enough to matter when things get hard.
• You have product instinct. You can tell the difference between what a customer asked for and what they need. That distinction is the job.
• You can hold a room. Enterprise stakeholders, procurement, IT security, a skeptical CFO. You have explained a technical decision to someone paying for it and they trusted you.
• You dive into a problem until it is finished. Reliability matters more here than speed. Prototypes that get declared victories are not deliveries.
• English fluent. German is a strong plus for our DACH accounts. Most of our enterprise customers are in the DACH market.

We Offer

• Location Berlin, hybrid.
• Base salary €80,000-€90,000 calibrated to experience.
• Equity Meaningful early-stage ownership.
• Holiday 30 days.
• Scope Direct ownership of named enterprise accounts from month one. No ticket queue. No handoffs.

About the Company

We help write the rules of this category:

• We co-authored DIN SPEC 91491, Europe’s first standard for AI-generated data structures, with Fraunhofer IIS, Humboldt-Innovation and DIN e.V. The standard is the credibility layer: in regulated enterprise, it opens doors.
• NVIDIA Inception member, with roots in research affiliated with Humboldt University of Berlin, and backed by leading European deep-tech investors.
• Production in regulated enterprise: energy utilities, pharma distribution, automotive, US logistics. Real problems, real customers, real data. You own named accounts from month one.

The Process

No take-home algorithm puzzles. No five-round loop.

1. 30-minute call with Nikolas (CEO) or Holger (CTO). The role, the problem space, your questions. Come ready to talk about something you have built and the decisions you made.
2. Paid work sample. We agree on something real. You decide how to build it. You walk us through what you made and why you made it that way, not what the spec asked for, what you chose and why.
3. Offer.

Apply

Send three things you’ve built and two sentences on why each one mattered.

No cover letter. Send to [email protected]. If one of them is a repo, tell us which parts you wrote and which parts the model wrote.

We hire for the singular strength and build the team around it. If you own the non-negotiables but don’t tick every box, write to us anyway. Talonic is an equal-opportunity employer; we build a team as rigorous and varied as the problems we take on.

Open role · Engineering · REQ FDE-001