Founding Product Engineer

Job description

**About Pling
**
Pling builds the operational backbone for medical practices, starting in dentistry. Most dental software handles the patient journey (documentation, treatment plans, billing) — we handle the operations enabling it: equipment management, regulatory compliance, team coordination, service procurement — a segment the wider industry has largely overlooked. Our vision: expand horizontally into other medical specialties and vertically into a marketplace connecting practices with manufacturers, technicians, and service providers.

Six-digit ARR, 90%+ gross margins, growing ~4x year over year
Proven product-market fit with a diverse customer base — from single practitioners to enterprise-level dental chains
Bootstrapped by design — profitable, growing without external capital, raising our first round in Q4/Q1
Sticky by design — compliance obligations make Pling mission-critical infrastructure; once integrated, customers don't churn

The team
The founding team combines deep startup, product, and domain expertise.

Paolo (CEO) — Stanford-educated, spent 8 years in Silicon Valley where he built and sold a startup, ex-BCG, two prior exits
Henrik (CPO) — ex-BCG, N26, ImmoScout24, early-stage startups
Jonas (CMO) — former clinician at Uniklinik Düsseldorf, ran his own practice, self-taught engineer. Currently owns Pling's technical architecture and codes alongside the team.

Tasks
The role
You'll own Pling's architecture and code, strategy and execution. The role is hands-on and impact-driven: you contribute to product discussions alongside the founders, then own the full technical lifecycle — architecture, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement in production — with a focus on real-world reliability and business impact.
Your mandate is to architect and ship the platform that takes Pling to the next 10x of customers and locations — AI-native by design, built to scale across multi-site groups across Europe — and to build the development pipeline that makes our shipping velocity hard to match.
We believe a small, AI-augmented engineering team can outship teams five times its size. You'll prove that with us.
What you'll do

Build complete features end-to-end — data model to API to UI
Own the technical direction — architecture, infrastructure, security, performance
Design and own the LLM pipelines that power Pling's AI features — prompt design, structured outputs, evals, monitoring, cost tracking
Set engineering standards across code and AI features — testing, CI/CD, observability, code review on one side; eval harnesses, regression checks, and quality metrics tied to business outcomes on the other
Define and lead the migration to our next-generation architecture — the stack choices are yours to shape
Build the development pipeline that makes our shipping velocity hard to match
Hire and lead — bring on the next engineer when the time is right, and define how the team works

Requirements
Experience

6–9+ years building production software in fast-paced environments, with at least 2 years focused on LLM-powered features in production
Pragmatic about architecture and tradeoffs; you've learned that good engineering usually means removing complexity, not adding it
Comfort across the stack — backend center of gravity, but able to ship end-to-end
Production experience with Python, TypeScript/Node.js, and modern databases (SQL and NoSQL)

AI-native fluency

Deep practical understanding of LLM behavior: prompting, structured outputs, context window management, common failure modes, handling non-determinism, and writing evals that catch regressions before users do
Pragmatic about model selection — pick across providers (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open-weights) based on cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs for each use case
Know when not to reach for an LLM. A lot of good engineering is knowing when a regex, a lookup table, or deterministic code is the right answer. You hate AI slop as much as you love AI leverage.
Follow the field actively and adopt new tools when they earn it.

Builder mindset

You'd rather build than manage. AI excites you because it lets you ship at a scale you couldn't before.

Engineering excellence

Code quality is a habit, not an afterthought: testing, review, quality gates
Strong on operational excellence: security, reliability, performance, observability
Confident with CI/CD and production deployments

Collaboration

Clear communicator who explains technical trade-offs to founders, customers, and future hires
Balance speed, quality, and long-term sustainability in your decisions
Fluent English. German is a big plus — our customers operate in German

Benefits
Why Pling

Strong traction in an attractive niche. Profitable, growing fast, in a category few others are addressing.
An ambitious platform vision. Horizontal expansion to other medical specialties and a vertical marketplace dimension both within reach.
Equity anchored at pre-fundraise valuation. Because we haven't raised yet, the upside on equity granted now is materially higher than it will be even six months from now.
Dynamic, fast-paced environment with experienced founder-operators and domain experts — direct access, fast decisions.
AI-native team. Everyone at Pling uses AI as a daily tool.
Remote-first today with regular team meetups in Berlin. Hybrid options as we open offices.
30 days of PTO.

Pleasy apply with a short message:

why this role
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