Founding Engineer

About the Role

As a Founding Engineer at SANOVIO, you will play a key role in building the AI-powered procurement infrastructure that tackles one of the biggest and most complex cost problems in European healthcare.

This is a fast-paced, hands-on role for engineers with high agency, strong technical depth, and a founder mindset. We’re looking for a full-stack generalist with a strong frontend affinity. You excel at designing user flows and implementing them in React and TypeScript, while owning outcomes end-to-end across backend, data, AI-enabled workflows, and cloud deployment. You thrive amid uncertainty and incomplete requirements, move quickly, and still care deeply about architecture, clean code, and long-term quality.

If you are a passionate builder who thrives at the intersection of full-stack development and AI, this is your opportunity to work closely with the founders, shape the product, and help us scale toward €10M ARR in 2026.

Tasks

• Owning end-to-end product workflows, from frontend UX to backend systems, data pipelines, and edge cases
• Building world-class frontend experiences in React and TypeScript alongside scalable, reliable backend systems
• Designing and owning AI-enabled systems, including embeddings, retrieval, and agents that create real operational leverage
• Developing and operating data pipelines for large-scale unstructured data
• Making pragmatic technical decisions on architecture, tools, and frameworks to balance speed and quality
• Deploying, running, and maintaining software in cloud environments with a “you ship it, you run it” mindset
• Writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code with scalable, reusable components and APIs
• Collaborating across the stack and raising the engineering bar through reviews, mentoring, and technical leadership

Requirements

We are looking for stellar engineers with a strong background in full-stack software engineering and AI, and the potential to grow and lead teams in the future. 3–5 years of experience is a plus, but we hire for skill, ownership, and output.

General Profile

• Generalist engineer with a frontend affinity, capable of building across backend, data, and AI
• End-to-end product ownership, driving ideas from concept to customer-ready production
• Proactive execution in ambiguous environments, turning unclear requirements into shipped software
• High-speed delivery paired with a focus on clean code and scalable architecture
• Close iteration with users and clients, including collaboration across different cultures
• Strong problem-solving ability and fast adoption of new technologies
• Motivation to build excellent software in a fast-paced startup environment
• Willingness to work in-person in Munich with a higher intensity than a traditional 9–5 role

Technical skillset

• Strong experience with full-stack software engineering, especially React and TypeScript, with excellent understanding of constructing user flows
• Solid backend engineering skills, ideally with Node.js, and experience designing APIs and data model
• Proven track record of architecting and building production-grade software systems
• Cloud and DevOps experience with Docker
• AI experience is a plus, especially embeddings and retrieval, structured outputs and tool calling, evals, and agentic workflows beyond prompt engineering

Leadership and communication

• You naturally take responsibility and enjoy leading
• You’re one of the strongest engineers in the team and make everyone else better
• Everyone can come to you for advice on how to fix their hardest problems
• You communicate clearly and are credible with technical stakeholders and clients

Bonus if you

• Can share a portfolio of projects, shipped products, or a GitHub with meaningful work
• Have built workflow-heavy B2B products, internal tools, or operations software
• Have experience scaling systems from early usage to larger production workloads
• You are business proficient in Chinese

Benefits

• Great central office in Munich with regular team events and dinners
• Monthly Wellness budget
• Access to any AI or productivity tools you need to do your best work
• International scope & travel
• Flexible work setup with time-zone responsibility
• Meaningful compensation package including cash, performance bonus, and shares(Actual offers and compensation are based on specific job duties, experience, performance, total rewards structure, and other considerations).

About the interview process

Step 1: Intro call

Casual intro meeting with one of the founders to get to know each other and introduce SANOVIO.

Step 2: Technical interview

The technical interview consists of two parts:

• A take-home exercise, including a short presentation
• A system design interview

For the take-home exercise, we’d provide you with a task. You’ll have 2–3 hours to complete it, focusing on a real SANOVIO workflow and user flow in React and TypeScript, with a light end-to-end angle such as API integration, data modeling, edge cases, and clean architecture. Later, you’ll present your results to us.

Step 3: Personal Fit

Meet another co-founder to get a feel for our culture and working style.

Step 4: Offer & Reference Checks

If we see a great fit, you will get an offer, including a competitive compensation package. At the same time, we’ll ask you to provide 2–3 references so we can gather additional insights into your strengths and working style.

You know someone great? Introduce them to us and get up to €10,000 in referral bonuses if we hire them!

SANOVIO is building the AI-powered next generation of healthcare procurement infrastructure.

We bootstrapped to profitability with >€1M ARR in under 8 months, making us one of the fastest organically growing healthtech start-ups in Europe. Now we're hiring our first team members to help us reach our next milestone: €10M ARR by the end of 2026.

Hospital procurement is broken. Fragile supply chains, too many middlemen, no transparency on where products come from or what they should cost, and procurement teams too overworked to do anything but put out fires.

Come join us in tackling one of healthcare's most complex cost challenge in a €138B market across Europe, from our offices in Germany, Switzerland, and China.