Founding Engineer, AI Infra or Data

Zenline AI; Zürich; On-site; CHF 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Zenline AI is seeking a founding engineer to build and scale the AI infrastructure powering our agentic workflows in production. You will own data pipelines, backend systems, and observability while working directly with forward deployed engineers to turn customer workflows into robust platform capabilities.

You will operate in a Zurich-based, on-site role with strong ownership of end-to-end platform reliability and scalability, enabling retailers, brands and manufacturers to leverage AI agents

Qualifications

• 2–4 years building high-quality software systems.
• Experience with LLM-powered applications and agent workflows.
• Experience designing or improving data pipelines and ETL workflows.
• Strong platform engineering mindset with focus on reliability and observability.
• Entrepreneurial ownership and accountability for problem areas.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve our agentic workflow platform and reusable tools.
• Implement agent components and platform integrations for rapid deployment.
• Scale data pipelines and production data processing to support customers.
• Design efficient data infrastructure and maintain scalable backend systems.
• Collaborate with Forward Deployed Engineers to translate customer workflows into durable platform capabilities.
• Harden backend, improve agent execution and developer ergonomics.

Skills

Backend development

Data pipelines

AI agent workflows

Observability

Platform engineering

Tools

Agent frameworks

Workflow engines

Distributed systems

Data warehouses

Job description

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 (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 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 else 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.