Founding Engineer

Role can be based remotely in the EEA or hybrid in our London or Munich offices.

Fixed software is the wrong shape for logistics, because every team runs its processes differently. Tare is our solution. Combining agentic AI with deterministic logic means Tare fits to any customer but runs the same way every single time. We have just closed our pre-seed funding round with a top European VC and we are now looking for a founding engineer to build Tare with us.
About Tarebase
We're Dom and Felix, the two co-founders of Tarebase. Dom is a former SVP at a global unicorn, overseeing tens of millions in global carrier spend, with deep logistics domain experience from Amazon, Nestle and EY. Felix was a founding engineer at Raycast and has spent more than two decades building software systems. We've raised pre-seed funding from a top-tier European VC and are building our MVP together with early design partners, who will become our first customers. As our first employee, you'd have a real say in both the product and the engineering decisions behind it.
Logistics is difficult to run well, and experienced people are hard to hire. Smaller businesses often pay too much for shipping, struggle to give customers a good delivery experience, and can't match larger competitors' technology or hiring budgets. The software available to them is often expensive, dated or too cumbersome. We want to make logistics less of a burden so these businesses can spend more time selling their products.They're the customers we want to build for: Europe alone has around 26 million SMEs, employing more than 100 million people.
Just putting a chat interface and GPT-wrapper on top of the problem is not what we're building. We're combining extraction and analysis, workflow automation, agentic and compiled AI with deterministic, verifiable logic. Recent advances in AI make more of this possible, but building a system that does it reliably is still hard. We're looking for someone who wants to advance the state of the art in this area with us.
About you
The description below is an ideal, not a checklist. If you don't tick every box but feel ready for the challenges of being the first engineer at an early-stage startup, we'd still like to hear from you. What matters most to us is that you're motivated, committed, willing to stick with hard problems, and someone we can count on.
You have a strong technical background and a track record of building and shipping software systems, whether that's cloud backends, web applications, AI-supported systems or a mix of these. You enjoy working across engineering and product. You think like a product engineer: you care about UX/UI, and you want direct contact with customers and the people who use what you build.
You'll work mostly in Rust and TypeScript, across the full stack: data engineering, AI, backend, frontend, infrastructure and deployment. We especially value experience with either language from before AI coding tools and a solid understanding of its ecosystem so you can make considered choices. We also value experience operating distributed systems and data-intensive systems in the cloud, including multi-tenant environments and the scaling and security challenges they bring, databases, and durable execution runtimes.
You use coding agents effectively, but stay close to the code. You know their limitations in a large codebase, review and challenge their work, and take testing, debugging, refactoring and documentation seriously. You can design useful tests and evaluations, manage complexity, and tell when something is genuinely ready to ship.
You also enjoy digging into challenging problems. You keep up with what current models, agent harnesses and research make possible, and you can judge what actually works for a given use case. You know how to build agents and AI workflows into a product and use evaluations, validation and deterministic logic to make what they produce consistent and verifiable. You're comfortable extracting structure from messy documents and care a lot about data quality. You experiment, measure the results, question your assumptions, and keep going until you've found a solution that really holds up.
You can turn that work into shipped software, taking a product idea or technical direction through design and implementation without waiting for someone to assign you a ticket. We work remotely, so clear communication and follow-through matter a lot to us. We value people who manage their own work, can be counted on, and raise important issues early.
How to apply
Apply with the button on this page.
Please ensure to use a hand-written CV. We read every application ourselves. It's fine to use tools for spelling or translation, but we want to hear your voice.
Our process
The process should take a few weeks from start to finish depending on your availability.

• Application review. If we love your resume we will send over some short questions.

• Intro call with Dom and Felix. An informal conversation about the role, the technology and what you're looking for.

• Technical deep dive with Felix. We talk briefly about a system you’ve worked on (no need to share anything confidential), then work through a system design problem together.

• Half a day with us in Munich or London. We cover your travel, hotel if needed, and meals. You spend about two hours on a made-up task similar to the problems we work on, using your usual tools and coding agents. Then we have lunch, go through your work together, and talk through a customer scenario.

• References and offer. We speak with 1-2 people you've worked with (only with your agreement) and aim to decide within 48 hours.

If we don't move forward after the technical conversation or later, we'll share some feedback with you.
Compensation: €100.000–120.000 base salary plus 0.75–1% equity
Setup: A MacBook Pro and whatever else you need to work well. If you'd rather not work from home, we'll pay for a coworking space n