Founding Product Engineer

**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
• what you'd bring
• something you've built
• CV or LinkedIn

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