Job description
Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (m/w/d)
About the job
Join our small, hands-on team to create AI solutions in enterprise context and launch your own ideas at the same time. You’ll have real freedom, shape the tech, and share in the success (salary, earnings share and equity in products we launch). If you have a startup spirit, enjoy side projects, and want to see your work make a real impact, we'd love to connect.
About us
Overfly is a Berlin-based Partner for Applied AI. We're a team of engineers, product builders and strategists who help enterprises find high-impact AI use cases, then design and build them to production.
Tasks
What you'll be doing
Technical leadership
- Owning the technical direction of client projects end-to-end, from architecture decisions (multi-tenant cloud, auth, data isolation) to production-ready delivery on enterprise cloud infrastructure (Azure, GCP, OVH)
- Making and defending the unsexy calls: IaC standards, release strategies, CI/CD pipelines, security architecture, deployment topology
- Designing systems that hold up in regulated enterprise environments, including DSGVO, ISO 27001, SOC2, pen-tests, and compliance reviews
Stakeholder navigation in complex enterprise settings
- Being the technical voice in client meetings. You translate trade-offs, scope feasibility, and shape requirements with non-technical decision makers, IT security, legal, and C-levels in parallel
- Running the room when enterprise stakeholders disagree: mediating between internal IT (firewalls, VPN, network architecture), external partners (hosting, auth providers), and process owners with conflicting agendas
- Managing expectations proactively: surfacing risks early, correcting unrealistic cost or timeline assumptions with real numbers, and escalating through the right channels when needed
- Communicating commitments that hold. Binding dates, clear scope, honest status. Not optimism disguised as a plan
Forward Deployed work
- Embedding into client teams, shipping real features alongside their engineers and process owners, often across multiple organisations at once
- Ramping quickly into unfamiliar codebases, legacy enterprise systems (Oracle, SAP-adjacent environments) and complex domains (utility metering, insurance, FMCG)
- Translating user reality (e.g. the Sachbearbeiterin who wants Excel-like UX) into something your engineering team can actually build
Team organisation
- Coordinating internal engineers, external partners, and client staff on the same delivery: clear ownership, clear handoffs, clear status
- Unblocking problems across projects, reviewing code, and raising the bar on how we ship
- Collaborating with strategy and product to turn business goals into technical plans with budget and timeline attached
Hands-on engineering
- Building full-stack solutions with TypeScript (React, Node, Next.js, Tailwind) and integrating AI where it creates real value, not where it's trendy
- Staying ahead on AI tooling and pulling what works into our projects and workflows
Requirements
What you'll bring
- 5–8+ years of full-stack experience (React, Node, TypeScript) and at least one production deployment you personally owned from architecture to go-live on a major cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP or equivalent)
- Proven ability to own technical direction from start to finish: architecture, infra, CI/CD, security, delivery
- Consulting or agency experience working directly with enterprise clients, ideally in regulated environments (utilities, finance, insurance, pharma)
- Outstanding communication skills in German and English. You can explain a VPN trade-off to a non-technical CFO and a compliance officer in the same meeting, and both leave convinced
- Calm under stakeholder pressure. You know when to push back, when to escalate, and when to just ship
- An entrepreneurial mindset. You turn ambiguity into plans and plans into working products
- German at a professional working level. Non-negotiable for our enterprise client conversations
Tech we use
Our current tools include:
- AI frameworks and APIs (LangChain, OpenAI, Google Vertex AI, Azure AI)
- TypeScript (React, Node), Tailwind CSS, Next.JS, Vite, React, React Router
- Analytics tools like Mixpanel and PostHog
- Databases like Supabase, Postgresql, Azure Cosmos DB
- Deployment platforms (Vercel, Google Cloud)
Benefits
What we offer
- Real equity in the products we build together, with an option to invest further
- 4-day work week as team default
- Customizable perks (transportation pass, gym membership, rental bike), choose what fits your life
- Autonomous, self-managed work environment
- Experienced, flat team structure, no corporate hierarchy here
- Opportunity to build practical, valuable AI products used by real people
- Remote or hybrid work model: 2 days/week at Delta Campus, the rest remote
- Competitive salary plus annual bonus based on company performance
How to apply
We don't need a polished CV. Just send us your LinkedIn profile or a quick overview of your background, plus short answers (2–5 sentences each) to these prompts:
- A project you built yourself and what made it special
- Why you're excited about AI, especially something you think most people get wrong
- A full-stack project where you took technical leadership
- A clever non-technical solution or "hack" you've used to gain an advantage
This helps us quickly understand who you are and what motivates you.
