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 d