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Vanilla Steel GmbH

<div><h4 class="jobSectionHeader">Your mission</h4>
We are a Berlin-based startup transforming how industrial materials are bought and sold across Europe. One of the oldest industries in the world still runs on Excel, PDF and email. We are replacing that with AI that runs the buying and selling workflow end to end, increasing liquidity, speeding up transactions and reducing waste for hundreds of steel and metal distributors. 
 
We have strong early traction, real enterprise customers and committed investors. We are a lean, technical team scaling our enterprise pilots and building the AI infrastructure underneath them. 
 
Your job as Senior Product Engineer is to make sure we deliver on that traction and stay ahead. You partner closely with Co-founder Simon, who owns sales; you own that we ship, that enterprise customers succeed, and that the product stays in front. This is a senior, hands-on role with three pillars. 
 
1. Build and ship with AI 
<ul><li>
Ship production software using AI as a force multiplier &mdash; prototypes, integrations, customer-facing flows &mdash; and get them live, not just specified.</li><li>
Move our AI from assisting people to running the buying and selling workflow as autonomous agents.</li><li>
Integrate our pipeline deep into customer systems and ERPs (SAP, Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics), and design for fast onboarding so a new customer reaches value in days, not months.</li><li>
Our stack: Python, FastAPI, Pydantic AI, Pydantic Logfire, JavaScript/Node, React, GCP, Kubernetes. You won't be expected to master all of it on day one, but you should be comfortable navigating it with AI tooling.</li></ul>
2. Lead technical communication with enterprise customers 
<ul><li>
Own the technical relationship with three to five enterprise customers: run the discovery workshops, scope the work, run first-line UAT, and steer executive, procurement and IT conversations.</li><li>
Translate customer reality into clear build decisions and engineering reality into clear customer expectations. Hold the line on scope when a request will not move the metric that matters.</li><li>
Represent the product credibly to senior stakeholders, and to investors when a customer also sits on our cap table.</li></ul>
3. Help build the product org 
<ul><li>
Drive the shipping cadence: a weekly or biweekly release rhythm with engineering, and sequence delivery against engineering capacity with our Head of Tech.</li><li>
Make the strategic product calls &mdash; what we build next, and what we deliberately do not.</li><li>
As we scale enterprise customers, help grow how the team works and the product function around you.</li></ul><h4 class="jobSectionHeader">
Your profile</h4>
You are a builder who ships with AI and can run an enterprise customer relationship and help shape how we build. Two non-negotiables: technical capability and product sense. Everything else sits behind those. 
<ul><li>
Excellent written and verbal communication in English and in German (C1 or C2 must have, native not required). You can run a technical workshop with a German industrial customer end to end.</li><li>
Berlin-based or willing to relocate. The role also includes regular travel to customer sites in Central Germany (~2&ndash;3 days per month).</li><li>
5+ years building product, with at least 2 years in genuinely technical roles (engineering, technical PM at a real engineering company, solutions architect, forward-deployed engineer).</li><li>
Deep LLM/AI experience: you build and ship real software with LLMs and agents in production, not just prototype or chat with them. You can walk us through something you shipped and how you built it. Bonus if you have shipped an agentic or autonomous system.</li><li>
AI coding tools: you use Cursor, Claude Code or comparable as your primary development environment - not occasionally, but as the way you build. This is how you ship independently without engineering support.</li><li>
Strong technical instincts: you read code, evaluate an architecture, and hold your own in a design review with engineering.</li><li>
First-line UAT discipline: you have personally signed off (or rejected) enterprise releases and can describe the framework you used.</li><li>
Comfortable owning several enterprise customers in parallel without dropping balls, and pushing back on scope when needed.</li><li>
Able to simplify complexity and make fast, sound decisions under pressure.</li></ul>
Nice-to-have: background in an AI-first company; ERP integrations (SAP, Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics) or procurement / order-management workflows; early-stage or founding-engineer experience, industrial B2B, metals, supply chain or manufacturing experience.<h4 class="jobSectionHeader">
Why us?</h4><ul><li>
Ownership of named enterprise accounts, judged on outcomes rather than hours.</li><li>
Direct technical impact: you see what you ship in production within weeks.</li><li>
Senior co-founders who are technical operators, not pitch-deck founders. Decisions happen fast.</li><li>
Competitive base, performance bonus, and meaningful equity at a Series A company.</li><li>
Regular travel to customer sites (mainly Central Germany).</li><li>
Subsidised Urban Sports Club membership and Deutschlandticket.</li><li>
Hybrid work format, office in the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin.</li><li>
Regular team events, company breakfasts and Friday drinks.</li></ul><h4 class="jobSectionHeader">
About us</h4>
We are a Berlin-based startup that has successfully established a leading digital-first trading company for industrial metals across Europe.
The multi-billion-euro metal trading industry is operated on Excel, PDF and Email. Our mission is to integrate smart technology and data to drive every decision, transaction, and workflow in the steel industry. Our technologies &amp; services increase liquidity, accelerate transactions, reduce scrapping rates and enhance trading convenience for hundreds of steel and metal distributors across Europe.</div>

Senior Product Engineer

Join Vanilla Steel GmbH and explore 1   exciting career opportunities. They're hiring for various roles with options for remote or on-site work. Apply today and become part of their innovative team.

Vanilla Steel GmbH

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Senior Product Engineer