FoundingData & AI Engineer

Vwala; Gent; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity (ESOP)

Unlimited, flexible vacation policy

Medical insurance

Meal vouchers €10/day (Belgium)

Yearly learning budget + unlimited 2nd

Job summary

Vwala is building a European-focused personal finance platform. We seek a founding Data & AI Engineer to shape the product from zero, ship end-to-end solutions, and own the data and AI stack across ingestion, enrichment, analysis, and action.

You will work in a high-autonomy, high-ownership environment with a founder mindset. You’ll help design AI systems, develop the dataset as the product, and collaborate with a small team in Ghent on a hybrid schedule, joining early-stage growth with

Qualifications

• Experience shipping production data/AI systems at scale.
• Hands-on with LLMs, RAG, agents, evals, cost/latency tuning.
• Proficient in TypeScript or willing to ramp up quickly.
• Comfort with Python/SQL/ML tooling when needed.
• Strong ownership; able to shape problems in a founder-led team.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the data layer to turn raw financial data into structured signals (merchant, category, recurrence).
• Build the learning/training pipeline for classifiers as the dataset grows.
• Develop AI infrastructure for natural language interactions with user data, including retrieval and guardrails.
• Set up evaluation/observability to measure real-world impact of models and prompts.
• Shape how aggregated, anonymized data becomes B2B insights with privacy by design.
• Work across the stack (React, TypeScript/Fastify, PostgreSQL, GCP) and ship end-to-end solutions.
• Engage with users and support tickets to understand problems and drive improvements.

Skills

Data & AI systems

LLMs in production

TypeScript

Python

SQL

MLOps

Tools

React

Fastify

PostgreSQL

GCP

Job description

Introduction

Vwala is building the platform that will transform how European households manage their money. We’re early stage, we're funded, and we're growing. We're looking for a founding product engineer to join us, someone who wants to build something that matters, ship solutions end-to-end, and sees the opportunity in being early. If you've ever wanted to shape a company from the ground up: the product, the architecture, the culture. Don’t look any further, this is that role.

About Vwala

Vwala is a personal finance startup, founded in September 2025, on a mission to bring financial peace of mind to every European household. We make it effortless to understand, manage, and reduce recurring expenses so people save money without complexity and focus on what truly matters in life. The vision is a trusted platform across Europe that turns raw financial data into real savings, effectively reshaping how tens of millions of families think about money. Our North Star Metric is Total Money Saved, and at scale, that number gets very large. We're currently a team of four (meet The Team). You’d join Vwala early and have the opportunity to help shape our future. Read more about our mission and vision here.

About The Role

Financial data is the raw material of everything we do. A user's transaction history reveals their behavior, their intentions, and where they're potentially leaving money on the table. But in its raw form, it's noisy, inconsistent, and rarely usable for analysis or action. Turning that into a clean, structured view of someone's financial life is a core data problem we have to solve, and it has to work at scale, across thousands of households, millions of transactions, and dozens of European banks. Concretely, that means answering questions like: Which canonical merchant is this transaction tied to? What category does it belong to? Is it recurring? Can we predict the next subscription bill before it hits? How does this family's spending stack up against similar households? Each of these is a data problem grounded in real product impact. The dataset is the product. Data plays a crucial role throughout Vwala’s product lifecycle (ingest > enrich > analyze > act). If you want to go deeper on the architecture and where this role sits within it, read Inside Vwala's Savings Engine. We also want to democratize financial knowledge, and AI plays a central role. You'll help shape and build the AI infrastructure that lets users interact with their finances: ask questions, surface patterns, get advice they can act on. And as the dataset grows, you'll think about how to turn it into B2B insights from anonymized aggregates with data integrity, privacy, and trust as core values. This is a high-agency role. We’re looking for people with a founder mindset: identifying problems, proposing solutions, and taking ownership through execution. In an early-stage company, that means navigating ambiguity, making trade-offs with incomplete information, and moving forward when things aren't fully defined. You’ll thrive here if you enjoy working in a bit of messiness, value progress over perfection, and bring the grit to push through challenges. Joining our founding team also means your decisions and contributions will have a lasting impact on the product, the team, and the culture we’re building. That's a lot of leverage, and it's why this role matters.

What you'll do

• Own and evolve the layer that turns raw, noisy bank transactions into structured signals like merchant identity, category, recurrence, and forecasted bills.
• Build the learning and training pipeline that makes our classifiers sharper, faster, and cheaper as the dataset grows, combining cheap deterministic strategies with LLMs as the safety net for the hard cases.
• Build the AI infrastructure that lets users interact with their own financial data in natural language, including the agent loop, retrieval, memory, tools, and guardrails.
• Set up the evaluation and observability that tell us whether a model change, a new strategy, or a prompt update actually improved real-world outcomes.
• Shape how Vwala turns aggregated, anonymized data into B2B insights, with privacy and rigor designed in from the start.
• Your center of gravity is data & AI, but expect to work across the stack (React, TypeScript/Fastify, Postgres, GCP, …) and ship end-to-end solutions with help from the team.
• Talk to users and read support tickets, the same as everyone else here. The people closest to the data understand the problems best.
• Treat users' financial data with the responsibility it deserves, and keep every decision pointed at the end goal: making families financially healthier with privacy and trust as core values.

Who you are

• This is a payroll-based position. Freelance, contractor, or self-employed arrangements are not available.
• Software engineering experience with a focus on data, specifically shipping production systems that deal with real, messy data at scale.
• Hands‑on experience building with LLMs in production (RAG, agents, structured outputs, evals, cost/latency tuning).
• Comfortable with TypeScript (or willing to ramp up fast) so you’re able to ship in our stack. Bring in the right Python/SQL/ML or other tooling when it’s needed.
• You care about the economics of intelligence: how much each classification costs, how fast it returns, whether it can be cached, and when the deterministic path is enough.
• You treat AI as daily leverage, a real multiplier for how you work, think, and build.
• High ownership mentality. You're comfortable working without PM overhead and can shape the problem, not just implement a pre‑packaged solution.
• You want to help shape not just the product, but the company and culture itself. Read our Operating Principles and if they resonate, you'll thrive here.
• You're in it for the ride. Building from zero to one (and beyond?) isn't a straight line. That excites you more than it scares you.

How we’ll take care of you

• A competitive salary
• Equity (ESOP). As a Founding Data & AI Engineer, you can get a meaningful slice of the pie
• Unlimited, flexible vacation policy
• Medical insurance
• Yearly learning budget + unlimited books
• Meal vouchers at €10/day (Belgium)
• Flexible work hours
• Your choice of computing equipment
• Flexible compensation via Payflip (Belgium): convert part of your 13th month into a bike, tech, extra pension, or whatever fits your life

Location

We’re a hybrid team, working together from our Ghent office (MC Square, Oktrooiplein 1) 2–3 days per week, and remotely the rest of the time. As we’re building both a team and a culture, being present in the office on our “office days” is an important part of how we do that, but we approach this with flexibility and trust.