Founding Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Airweave (YC X25); Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary with equity

Health, dental, and vision coverage

Direct impact on architecture decisions

Job summary

A technology start-up based in Amsterdam is seeking a Founding Software Engineer focusing on data infrastructure. In this mid-senior level role, you will design and scale robust data pipelines, work with Kubernetes and Terraform, and optimize systems for LLM inference. Competitive salary of €80K–€100K with equity offered. Join us to directly impact critical architecture decisions from day one.

Qualifications

• Experience building or operating data pipelines at scale.
• Comfortable with Kubernetes and Terraform.
• Understanding of database tradeoffs (pooling, replication, sharding).
• Experience with distributed systems and workflow orchestration.
• Interest in LLM infrastructure.
• Desire to work in early-stage environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and scale distributed data pipelines.
• Improve Temporal workflows for orchestration.
• Own Kubernetes deployments with Helm charts.
• Scale PostgreSQL for high throughput.
• Manage vector database infrastructure.
• Optimize LLM inference pipelines.
• Build monitoring and alerting systems.
• Use infrastructure as code with Terraform.

Skills

Data pipeline construction

Kubernetes

Terraform

Database scaling

Distributed systems

LLM infrastructure

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

PostgreSQL

Vespa

Job description

Founding Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Join Airweave (YC X25) to apply for the Founding Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure role.

This range is provided by Airweave (YC X25). Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base Pay Range

We're looking for a founding engineer to own Airweave's data and infrastructure layer, the systems that make our distributed search and data pipelines scalable, reliable and observable.

At Airweave, you'll build and operate the platform that thousands of AI agents depend on. That means distributed sync pipelines pulling data from dozens of sources, vector databases powering LLM search, and the orchestration layer that keeps it all running. You'll work closely with the product team, but your focus is on the foundation: making sure data flows reliably at scale, LLM inference stays fast, and the whole system holds up under real production load.

This is early‑stage infrastructure work. The architecture is still being shaped, and your decisions will define how we scale.

What You'll Work On

• Design and scale distributed data pipelines that sync hundreds of millions of documents from dozens of sources into advanced search indexes
• Build and improve Temporal workflows for parallel sync orchestration: retries, backpressure, and failure recovery across workers
• Own our Kubernetes deployments with Helm charts: autoscaling, and resource management for bursty search, sync and LLM workloads
• Scale PostgreSQL for high‑throughput; connection pooling, read replicas, partitioning (we ask a lot from this database)
• Manage vector database (Vespa) infrastructure: sharding, replication, backup strategies for large‑scale agentic search
• Orchestrate and optimize LLM inference pipelines: batching, caching, provider failover
• Build monitoring and alerting with Prometheus, Grafana, and custom instrumentation for cluster health
• Infrastructure as code for the base with Terraform

You Might Be a Fit If

• You've built or operated data pipelines at scale: ETL, event processing, streaming, or sync infrastructure
• You're comfortable with Kubernetes, Terraform, and infrastructure as code
• You've scaled databases and understand the tradeoffs (pooling, replication, sharding)
• You have experience with distributed systems: workflow orchestration, message queues, eventual consistency
• You're interested in LLM infrastructure: embeddings, vector search, inference optimization
• You like building reliable systems and have opinions about observability
• You're drawn to early‑stage environments where you own the whole problem

Bonus Points

• Experience with Temporal, Airflow, or similar workflow engines
• Background in scaling search (Elastic, Qdrant, Pinecone, Weaviate)
• Familiarity with LLM inference

What We Offer

• Customers including one of the world's leading AI labs
• Competitive salary (€80K–€100K) with meaningful equity (0.25%–0.75%)
• Health, dental, and vision coverage
• Work in‑person in the heart of Amsterdam (Herengracht) with a highly-skilled, technical team
• Direct impact on architecture and infrastructure decisions from the first week

Seniority Level

Mid‑Senior level

Employment Type

Full‑time

Job Function

Engineering and Information Technology

Industries: Software Development