Forward Deployed Engineer (m/f/d)

<br><strong> ⭐️ Your Impact:</strong><p>The European trades are one of the least digitised industries left. Software<br>penetration sits under 15%, against roughly 70% in the US. The labour<br>productivity gap runs about 30%. Millions of skilled people spend their evenings<br>on paperwork instead of the craft they trained for — in the industry that has to<br>deliver the energy transition.<br><br>There is almost no incumbent software to displace. That is unusual, and it won't<br>last.<br><br>smalt replaces the back office entirely rather than selling Meister another tool<br>to manage. In the last six months that went from a partner app and a dashboard<br>to around thirty AI agents in production - pricing real jobs, qualifying real<br>leads, running the operations of businesses whose payroll depends on it working.<br><br>These days building thirty agents is easy. Knowing which thirty is what's challenging.<br><br>That only comes from being in the Betrieb and talking to the Handwerker.<br><br>That's what this role is for.<br><br><strong>What you'll do</strong><br><br>You'll sit in Handwerksbetrieben - at the Meister's desk, in the van, on site, next to our team -<br>and watch how the work actually happens. Then you'll come back and build the<br>thing that fixes it, often multiple times on the same day.<br><br>- <strong>Spend real time with partners.</strong> Not a quarterly customer call. You'll know<br>  our Meister by name, understand their P&amp;L, and notice the thing they've<br>  stopped complaining about because they assume it can't be fixed.<br>- <strong>Build across the stack.</strong> Python/FastAPI services, Vue interfaces, Flutter<br>  screens, agent loops, data pipelines - whatever the problem needs.<br>- <strong>Own agents in production.</strong> Not demos. Agents that price real jobs, answer<br>  real customers, and cost real money when they're wrong. Reliability,<br>  evaluation, structured output, graceful failure.<br>- <strong>Decide what to build.</strong> You'll write your own acceptance criteria. Nobody<br>  here will hand you a spec, and waiting for one is how to fail in this<br>  role.<br>- <strong>Measure whether it worked.</strong> Hours saved per partner, offers that go out<br>  untouched, leads answered before a competitor picks up. If the number didn't<br>  move, it didn't work.<br><br><strong>What that looks like in practice</strong><br><br>In July one of our Meister got an early build of the partner app, ahead of the<br>general rollout. He tested it between jobs and sent screenshots: from a calendar<br>appointment he could no longer jump into the project to pull the customer's<br>phone number. He had a reply in two minutes. Within the hour he'd also asked for<br>a navigation button - tap the address, go straight to maps.<br><br>Neither was news. Both were already being worked on before he hit send.<br><br>We aim to be fast, and close enough to the work that we've usually seen the problem before the person living it has to tell us.<br><br><br></p><br><strong>✨ What Makes You a Great Fit:</strong><p>You might be a great fit if you<br><br>- Have owned something end to end - architecture through delivery through the<br>  unglamorous iteration afterwards. We don't count years; we look at what you<br>  carried.<br>- Get obsessed with a problem rather than a stack. The tools change every few<br>  months. The curiosity compounds.<br>- Would rather ship something that changes a tradesperson's week than win an<br>  argument about abstractions.<br>- Actually like talking to customers, and have changed your mind about a feature<br>  because of something a user said.<br>- Are comfortable being the least knowledgeable person in a room full of<br>  electricians, and ask the question anyway.<br>- Can hold "ship it today" and "this needs to survive two years" in your head at<br>  the same time, and know which one applies.<br><br>Our stack, so you know what you're walking into:<br><br>- <strong>Backend:</strong> Python, FastAPI, async SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL (with pgvector), Celery, Redis<br>- <strong>Frontend:</strong> Vue 3, TypeScript, Vite, PrimeVue<br>- <strong>Mobile:</strong> Flutter<br>- <strong>AI:</strong> Anthropic, Open source and Google models, vector search over partner and catalog data<br>- <strong>Infra:</strong> Google Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Sentry<br><br>We care that you're strong somewhere and unafraid everywhere else. If you've<br>never written Vue but you've shipped production systems and you learn fast, that<br>is fine - several of us hadn't either.<br><br>What we do look for:<br><br>- Production experience with LLM-powered features, and the scars that come with it: evaluation, structured output parsing, context management, error recovery<br>- A track record of shipping things people actually used<br>- High agency. You'll get context and constraints, not instructions.<br>- Raw intelligence paired with a humble mindset<br><br>German is helpful and you'll pick some up either way - our partners speak it all day. It isn't a requirement but definitely a nice to have. The the team works in English.</p><br><strong>☀️ Why You'll Love Working With Us:</strong><p>- Top-of-market compensation and a meaningful VSOP package<br>- Direct access to real users and short feedback loops<br>- Real ownership, and direct proximity to the founders - and to General<br>  Catalyst, noa, Owl Ventures and Heartfelt<br>- A team of five engineers who have shipped more in six months than most teams<br>  do in two years, and who set the pace themselves</p><p>Find <a href="https://www.arbeitnow.com">Jobs in Germany</a> on Arbeitnow</a>