[Hiring] Founding CTO @HEYGermany UG

Role Description

We are looking for a hands-on, product-minded Founding CTO with the ambition to build HeyGermany as a co-founder. You will take ownership of our technology and play a leading role in product development. You will work closely with the Founder & CEO on company strategy, product direction and execution. We already have a live MVP (www.hey-germany.com), an initial recognition engine and talent pool, 400+ talent pool conversions, our first enterprise pilot and secured public funding. Your challenge will be to turn this foundation into a scalable technology platform that can take HeyGermany from one profession to many.

What You’ll Do

• Own our technology strategy and architecture and help shape our product strategy and roadmap.
• Design and build scalable systems for qualification recognition, document processing, workflow automation and talent matching.
• Turn complex regulatory and bureaucratic processes into simple, intuitive digital products.
• Stay hands-on across the stack and make key decisions across frontend, backend, APIs, data and cloud infrastructure.
• Develop our AI capabilities where they create real value, particularly in document analysis, structured data extraction and workflow automation.
• Work directly with users, employers and domain experts. As we grow, you will build and lead HeyGermany’s product and engineering team.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong hands-on development skills.
• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering or a closely related technical discipline. A Master’s degree is preferred.
• A proven track record of shipping a real product end-to-end in a leading technical role, for example as a founder, founding engineer, startup CTO or technical lead.
• Strong experience with a modern web stack, ideally TypeScript, React/Next.js, backend development, APIs, databases and cloud infrastructure.
• Practical experience building with LLMs and modern AI systems, including RAG, agents and evaluations, and using AI effectively in your day-to-day work.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to turn customer and business problems into pragmatic product and technical decisions.
• The ability to move fast in an early-stage environment and make good trade-offs between speed, quality and scalability.
• A founder mindset and strong connection to our mission. You want real ownership, are comfortable with the ambiguity of a pre-seed company and care about the business beyond technology.
• Strong English communication skills are required. German is a plus.
• Experience with document intelligence/OCR, B2B SaaS, marketplaces, HR Tech, Global Mobility or regulated/GDPR-sensitive products is valuable, but not required.

Benefits

• €50,000–€65,000 annual base salary, depending on experience, plus meaningful equity reflecting the founder-level ownership of the role.
• The opportunity to become a true co-founder, with long-term ownership of technology and meaningful participation in the company’s upside.
• Founder-level influence over product, technology and company strategy, with the opportunity to build our architecture and future engineering organisation from the ground up.
• A live product, early traction, our first enterprise pilot and secured public funding. We are currently in conversations with investors for our next stage of growth.
• The opportunity to work on a problem with tangible social and economic impact: helping international professionals access jobs that match their qualifications while helping employers access talent they urgently need.