Founding Engineer,
AI Infra or Data Eng.

About Zenline AI

Every product you buy is the result of a bunch of decisions. Most of them are still made in spreadsheets. At Zenline, we build AI agents that make these decisions for retailers, brands and manufacturers. Our goal is to move the physical product economy into the agentic era.

Our team brings experience from Google, P&G, BCG, Amazon and ETH Zürich, and we are backed by Seedcamp, one of Europe’s leading early-stage funds.

We build agent-native, so every new model release makes our agents better.

The role

This is a full-time, on-site role in Zurich for an exceptional engineer who wants to build the infrastructure behind real production AI systems.

As a Founding Engineer focused on AI infrastructure or data engineering, you own and improve the systems that power Zenline’s agentic workflows, data pipelines, data collection and reusable tools. Our Forward Deployed Engineers work directly with retailers to build workflows that solve concrete business problems. Your job is to make sure the platform underneath is robust, extensible, observable and maintainable as those workflows scale across customers.

You work across backend systems, agent orchestration, data infrastructure, efficient data processing, workflow execution, observability, testing, deployment reliability and the product surfaces that help teams build, debug and operate AI systems in production.

What you’ll do

• Build and evolve our agentic workflow platform: improve the infrastructure that lets teams compose reusable tools, custom logic, data steps, LLM calls, evaluations and business-specific workflows into reliable production agents.
• Build high-quality AI infrastructure: implement reusable agent components, workflow tools, data-processing primitives and platform integrations that help Forward Deployed Engineers ship quickly without fragile one-off systems.
• Scale our data pipelines: make data collection, enrichment and processing faster, more reliable and easier to run in production.
• Design efficient data infrastructure: process large retail datasets efficiently, keep data flows understandable and give AI agents the right context at the right time.
• Work closely with Forward Deployed Engineers: understand the workflows built for customers, spot repeated patterns and turn them into durable platform capabilities.
• Move between product and platform: improve the workflow builder, harden backend and data infrastructure, refactor agent execution logic and improve developer ergonomics.

Who we’re looking for

You are a strong technical generalist with a deep interest in AI agents, data infrastructure, platform engineering and production-quality software. You enjoy building the layer that lets others move faster without the product becoming fragile.

• Experience: 2–4 years building high-quality software systems, ideally across backend, infrastructure, data-intensive systems, agent platforms or workflow-heavy products.
• Agentic AI expertise: proven experience building LLM-powered applications, agent workflows, tool-calling systems or workflow orchestration.
• Data infrastructure knowledge: experience designing or improving data pipelines, ETL workflows, batch jobs or other systems that process data efficiently and reliably.
• Platform mindset: you care about abstractions, reliability, maintainability, observability, testing and developer experience.
• Entrepreneurial ownership: you are comfortable with ambiguity and take responsibility for entire problem areas.
• Nice to have: agent frameworks, workflow engines, distributed systems, data warehouses, evaluation systems or business concepts like P&L statements and balance sheets.

Career path

This is a founding path. Within one to two years, as we scale, you can grow into a Tech Lead (owning a product area and guiding a small team of engineers) or a Product Engineering Lead (at the intersection of product, customers and engineering). Your growth depends on the value you create for Zenline’s customers.

What you get

• Help shape Europe’s next generational AI company during its defining years.
• Full autonomy: a high degree of freedom and responsibility. Everyone at Zenline helps where it creates the most leverage.
• The skill of the decade: build agentic AI applications that run in production and change how enterprise teams work.
• Competitive salary, stock options and bonus.
• Zurich-based, in one of Europe’s most vibrant startup ecosystems. We help with your relocation.