About the Role
We're building context/fab, a venture-backed industrial AI startup on a mission to upgrade manufacturing by solving the hardest data problems on the shop floor.
We're looking for a Product Engineer who has actually lived on the shop floor and wants to build the software that makes it run better. You'll work directly with the founders and our first customers — sitting next to operators, reverse-engineering legacy MES integrations, scoping the next AI-driven workflow — and you'll ship the product end-to-end. This is a role for someone who refuses to draw a line between "product" and "engineering" and who has the manufacturing fluency to know which problems are worth solving.
What You'll Do
- Own product features end-to-end: from talking to plant operators and process engineers, to scoping, designing, building, and rolling out
- Bridge IT and OT — work across PLCs, SCADA, MES, historians, edge gateways on one side, and our cloud platform, knowledge graph, and AI workflows on the other
- Lead on-site deployments at customer plants: integrate data sources, validate behaviour against real production runs, and feed learnings back into the product
- Translate fuzzy shop-floor problems into crisp product requirements — and then build them
- Make calls on what to build next when no one else is in the room with the customer
- Collaborate closely with the AI, infrastructure, and edge teams to ship features that hold up at industrial scale
- Push the product to be simpler, faster, and more useful for the people who actually run plants
- Help shape our engineering and product culture from the ground up
What Makes You a Great Fit
- Manufacturing background — you've worked in or with plants, factories, or industrial sites, and you understand how a real production line actually runs
- Deep familiarity with IT/OT convergence: PLCs, SCADA, MES, historians, OPC UA, MQTT, Sparkplug B, MTConnect, ISA-95 — you don't need a glossary
- Product-minded — you talk to users, you have opinions about what matters, and you ship things that solve actual problems rather than ticking off requirements
- Strong engineering chops in Python, TypeScript, Go, or Rust — you can build full features without waiting for someone else to scaffold them
- Comfort working with messy real-world data — irregular timestamps, missing tags, multiple unit systems, legacy CSV exports
- Experience with API design, integration work, and data pipelines connecting industrial systems to modern software
- Pragmatic: you care about shipped impact and customer outcomes, not theoretical elegance
- Entrepreneurial — you want to build foundational systems at the earliest stage of a company
- Fluent in English; German is a strong plus given the customer base
Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's in Mechanical, Electrical, Industrial, or Computer Engineering — or equivalent experience earned on the shop floor
- Track record of shipping software in a production environment, ideally adjacent to manufacturing or industrial operations
- Strong communication skills — you can hold your own with plant managers, operators, and engineers
- Comfortable working independently in a high-ambiguity, high-velocity environment
- Willingness to travel to customer sites in Germany and the EU
Why Join Us
- Work directly with founders at the earliest stage of a startup
- Build at the intersection of AI, manufacturing, and product — solving problems with huge real-world impact
- Help keep European manufacturing competitive with deep-tech capabilities built for the next decade
- Shape our engineering and product culture from our Munich office
- Competitive salary and meaningful early equity
- Grow faster than anywhere else — experience a 10-year career in 2 years