Founding Engineer - AI Infra

Please only apply if you are confident in building Agentic Infrastructure.Why Zenline?We're moving one of the world's largest industries into the agent-first era, already working with Europe's biggest retailers. This is a rare chance to help build a generational AI company at a true inflection point and to be one of the first people getting AI-native – a skill everyone will need in the near future.The RoleThis 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, you will own and improve the systems that power Zenline's agentic workflows, data pipelines, scraping infrastructure, 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 underlying platform is robust, extensible, observable, and maintainable as those workflows and pipelines scale across customers.You will work across backend systems, agent orchestration, data infrastructure, efficient data processing, workflow execution, observability, testing, deployment reliability, and the product surfaces needed to help teams build, debug, and operate AI systems in production.What You’ll DoBuild and evolve our agentic workflow platform: Improve the infrastructure that lets teams compose reusable tools, custom logic, data-fetching 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 workflows quickly without creating fragile one-off systems.Scale data and scraping pipelines: Make our data-fetching, scraping, enrichment, and processing pipelines faster, more reliable, and easier to run smoothly in production.Design efficient data infrastructure: Work on systems that process large retail datasets efficiently, keep data flows understandable, and give AI agents access to the right context at the right time.Work closely with Forward Deployed Engineers: Understand the workflows being built for customers, identify repeated patterns, and turn them into durable platform capabilities that make the whole team faster.Move between product and platform: Improve the workflow builder itself, harden backend and data infrastructure, refactor agent execution logic, improve developer ergonomics, and help turn customer-specific workflows into reusable systems.Who We’re Looking ForYou are a strong technical generalist with a deep interest in AI agents, data infrastructure, platform engineering, and production-quality software systems. You enjoy building the layer that allows others to move faster without the product becoming fragile, while still caring about useful workflows for both Forward Deployed Engineers and end users.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 systems.Data infrastructure knowledge: Experience designing or improving data pipelines, scraping systems, 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. You like turning repeated custom work into reusable infrastructure.Entrepreneurial ownership: You are comfortable in ambiguity, take responsibility for entire problem areas, and want to help define how AI agents are built and operated in enterprise environments. You are always stepping in to help your colleagues.Bonus points: Experience with agent frameworks, workflow engines, distributed systems, scraping infrastructure, data warehouses, evaluation systems, or business concepts like PL statements and balance sheets.Career PathThis is a founding path. Within 1–2 years, as we scale rapidly, you’ll have the opportunity to grow into a:Tech Lead: Owning a product area and guiding a small team of engineersProduct Engineering Lead: Sitting at the intersection of product, customers and engineering and driving entire problem spacesYour growth depends not on building things, but on the value you create for Zenline's customers. We're not here to build what's fun for us – we're here to build products customers happily pay for. And we reward that fast.What you GetOnce-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Help shape Europe's next generational AI company during its defining years.Full autonomy: You work with a high degree of freedom and responsibility. Everyone at Zenline “scrubs the floor” and helps where it creates the most leverage.The skill of the decade: Build real agentic AI applications that run in production and change how enterprise teams work.Competitive package plus stock options plus bonusZurich-based. Join one of Europe's most vibrant startup ecosystems. We help you with your relocation.Ready to build Europe's next generational company? #J-18808-Ljbffr