Forward Deployed Engineer

• Hi, I'm Erik, CTO at Circonomit. We build the decision platform industrial companies use to plan their production. The problems that show up at every customer:
• Optimization software fails in the gap between what a company actually does and what the model assumes. Someone has to sit with the people who plan today and turn how they really decide into something a machine can compute.
• ERP and Excel exports arrive inconsistent and incomplete. The numbers that cannot be right have to be caught before the customer notices them.
• The same planning problem shows up at the second and third customer in a different shape. Somebody has to decide what stays project work and what becomes product.
• I need someone to take the customer's decision problem and own it end to end: build the model on their data, and stay with it until their management trusts the result enough to act on it.
• Our models decide what gets produced when, on which machine, and at what stock level. You build those models.
• We came out of RWTH research, raised €2.8M with Vorwerk Ventures, and have customers running on our models today. Small team, Cologne office.

Requirements

• You have taken quantitative models for real operations problems into production. Optimization, simulation, or both.
• You have done this more than once, end to end, and at least one of those models still runs without you.
• Recent, substantial hands-on experience writing and operating production Python.
• You identify the assumptions and constraints that decide the result, and clarify them with the customer before building.
• You are comfortable working directly with plant managers and controllers, and can explain a model to people who will never read the code.
• Experience with messy industrial data. Cleaning it is part of the work.
• Experience working in a team with shared standards, not only on your own projects.
• The ability to make technical decisions independently and explain the trade-offs.
• German at C1 level or above, and fluent English. You can run a customer meeting in German and write a specification in English. Both are required, because the customer conversations happen in German.
• Existing work visa for Germany.
• You should enjoy turning ambiguous customer needs into models that get used, rather than handing over after the concept. Priorities change as customers do, and we make scope and trade-offs explicit together.

Benefits

• Ownership.
• The customer's model from the first conversation to the version running in production.
• Shaping the product.
• You make the call at the customer, and you argue the case for what belongs in the platform.
• Real-world impact.
• Customers plan their production on our models today, and they tell you what changed.
• Direct collaboration.
• Small team, no org chart. We work directly together. Weekly feedback, both ways.
• Compensation.
• Competitive salary plus a VSOP package reflecting your contribution and development in the role.
• Cologne plus customer sites.
• Most of the work happens at your desk in Cologne. Expect regular travel across the DACH region for the decisive conversations, though not every week.
• Your setup and everyday extras.
• Hardware of your choice · AI tooling budget · sports membership · Deutschland-Ticket.
• Process:
• A 20-minute call, a technical conversation with two of us, a three-hour challenge on a real planning problem with messy data plus a 45-minute walkthrough, then a conversation with the team. Two to three weeks overall, with feedback within days.