Founding Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

at Airweave — The open-source context retrieval layer for agents

Amsterdam, North Holland, NLFull-time3+ years€80K - €100K EUR0.25% - 0.75% equityYC-S25

What the role involves

We're looking for a founding engineer to own Airweave's data and infrastructure layer, the systems that make our distributed search and data pipelines scalable, reliable and observable.

At Airweave, you'll build and operate the platform that thousands of AI agents depend on. That means distributed sync pipelines pulling data from dozens of sources, vector databases powering LLM search, and the orchestration layer that keeps it all running. You'll work closely with the product team, but your focus is on the foundation: making sure data flows reliably at scale, LLM inference stays fast, and the whole system holds up under real production load.

This is early-stage infrastructure work. The architecture is still being shaped, and your decisions will define how we scale.

What you'll work on

Design and scale distributed data pipelines that sync hundreds of millions of documents from dozens sources into advanced search indexes

Build and improve Temporal workflows for parallel sync orchestration: retries, backpressure, and failure recovery across workers

Own our Kubernetes deployments with Helm charts: autoscaling, and resource management for bursty search, sync and LLM workloads

Scale PostgreSQL for high-throughput; connection pooling, read replicas, partitioning (we ask a lot from this database)

Manage vector database (Vespa) infrastructure: sharding, replication, backup strategies for large-scale agentic search

Orchestrate and optimize LLM inference pipelines: batching, caching, provider failover

Build monitoring and alerting with Prometheus, Grafana, and custom instrumentation for cluster health

Infrastructure as code for the base with Terraform

You might be a fit if

You've built or operated data pipelines at scale: ETL, event processing, streaming, or sync infrastructure

You're comfortable with Kubernetes, Terraform, and infrastructure as code

You've scaled databases and understand the tradeoffs (pooling, replication, sharding)

You have experience with distributed systems: workflow orchestration, message queues, eventual consistency

You're interested in LLM infrastructure: embeddings, vector search, inference optimization

You like building reliable systems and have opinions about observability

You're drawn to early-stage environments where you own the whole problem

Bonus points

  • Experience with Temporal, Airflow, or similar workflow engines
  • Background in scaling search (Elastic, Qdrant, Pinecone, Weaviate)
  • Familiarity with LLM inference

What we offer

  • Customers including one of the world's leading AI labs
  • Competitive salary (€80K–€100K) with meaningful equity (0.25%–0.75%)
  • Health, dental, and vision coverage
  • Work in-person in the heart of Amsterdam (Herengracht) with a highly-skilled, technical team
  • Direct impact on architecture and infrastructure decisions from the first week

What they ask for

Bash/ShellGitKubernetesRedisDistributed SystemsMicroservicesETLSearch

About Airweave

Open-source context retrieval for AI agents across workspaces. It connects to productivity tools, email, document stores, or any private data source and transforms their contents into searchable knowledge bases for agents.

Full Airweave profile

Other roles at Airweave

Similar Engineering, Backend elsewhere

jobo is a browser extension. Open this on a computer to install it.