Forward Deployed Engineer

Hi, I'm Erik, CTO at Circonomit. We build the decision platform industrial companies use to plan their production. The problems that show up at every customer: Optimization software fails in the gap between what a company actually does and what the model assumes. Someone has to sit with the people who plan today and turn how they really decide into something a machine can compute. ERP and Excel exports arrive inconsistent and incomplete. The numbers that cannot be right have to be caught before the customer notices them. The same planning problem shows up at the second and third customer in a different shape. Somebody has to decide what stays project work and what becomes product. I need someone to take the customer's decision problem and own it end to end: build the model on their data, and stay with it until their management trusts the result enough to act on it. Our models decide what gets produced when, on which machine, and at what stock level. You build those models. We came out of RWTH research, raised €2.8M with Vorwerk Ventures, and have customers running on our models today. Small team, Cologne office. Requirements You have taken quantitative models for real operations problems into production. Optimization, simulation, or both. You have done this more than once, end to end, and at least one of those models still runs without you. Recent, substantial hands-on experience writing and operating production Python. You identify the assumptions and constraints that decide the result, and clarify them with the customer before building. You are comfortable working directly with plant managers and controllers, and can explain a model to people who will never read the code. Experience with messy industrial data. Cleaning it is part of the work. Experience working in a team with shared standards, not only on your own projects. The ability to make technical decisions independently and explain the trade-offs. German at C1 level or above, and fluent English. You can run a customer meeting in German and write a specification in English. Both are required, because the customer conversations happen in German. Existing work visa for Germany. You should enjoy turning ambiguous customer needs into models that get used, rather than handing over after the concept. Priorities change as customers do, and we make scope and trade-offs explicit together. Benefits Ownership. The customer's model from the first conversation to the version running in production. Shaping the product. You make the call at the customer, and you argue the case for what belongs in the platform. Real-world impact. Customers plan their production on our models today, and they tell you what changed. Direct collaboration. Small team, no org chart. We work directly together. Weekly feedback, both ways. Compensation. Competitive salary plus a VSOP package reflecting your contribution and development in the role. Cologne plus customer sites. Most of the work happens at your desk in Cologne. Expect regular travel across the DACH region for the decisive conversations, though not every week. Your setup and everyday extras. Hardware of your choice · AI tooling budget · sports membership · Deutschland-Ticket. Process: A 20-minute call, a technical conversation with two of us, a three-hour challenge on a real planning problem with messy data plus a 45-minute walkthrough, then a conversation with the team. Two to three weeks overall, with feedback within days.