Forward Deployed Engineer

We are building the world's decision infrastructure: the strategic twin of every industrial organization. Our customers map reality, with its levers and constraints, into a model, and we run large-scale combinatorial optimization over the critical decisions in their value chain. We help Europe stay strong and the German Mittelstand make good decisions between market shifts, orders, machines and people. Founded by Dana (CEO) and Erik (CTO) from RWTH research, backed by a €2.8M round led by Vorwerk Ventures, with customers live on our optimization models. Your mission Hi, I'm Erik, CTO of Circonomit. This ad is specific on purpose: you should be able to tell from it whether this is your job. Most optimization software fails in the same place. Not in the solver, but in the gap between what a company actually does and what the model assumes. Somebody has to sit with the people who plan today, understand how they really decide, and turn that into something a machine can compute. That is this role, and you do it hands on. You take the customer's planning problem apart, you build the model yourself, in code, on their data, and you stay with it until their management trusts the result enough to act on it. Then you bring back the part that should stop being project work and become product. Most of this happens at your desk in Cologne, with days at the customer's site when the decisive conversations happen. You are the shortest path between our product and reality. What does not survive at a customer does not work. We will not sugarcoat it: the data arrives messy, the first model is rarely the right one, and some weeks a customer deadline sets the priority. What you'll own The customer's decision problem. Sit with the people who plan today, understand capacities, costs, lead times and the constraints nobody wrote down, and turn it into a model whose answer a plant manager acts on. Inventory, scheduling, supply shortages, order prioritization: the decisions that determine whether a plant stays competitive.The customer's model, end to end. You own it from the first conversation to the version that runs in production. Our math and OR team owns the engine and the solver core underneath; you own what is built on top of it for this customer.The data it runs on. ERP and Excel exports, inconsistent and incomplete. You get them into shape yourself and notice when numbers cannot be right before the customer does.The result, all the way to trust. Not a demo. A model that is used, questioned, corrected and used again.The feedback loop into the product. You see the same problem at the second and third customer before anyone else does. You make the call at the customer, and you argue the case for what belongs in the platform.Your work, from the first line of code to a model the customer runs. Nobody hands you a ticket and waits.How we work Small team, short lines of communication, no layers. You own your work end to end: you build it, you ship it to production yourself, you run it. Feedback runs both ways and continuously, in weekly one-on-ones. We talk as equals, communicate proactively, and flag early when something isn't working out. Saying no is part of the job. We review each other's work, and we like being together in the Cologne office, because the fastest conversations still happen in a room. Requirements You have built quantitative models for real operations problems and taken them into production, not into a slide deck. Optimization, simulation, or a combination of both.You have done this more than once, end to end, and at least one of those models still runs without you in the room.You still write the production code yourself, today.Before you build anything, you can name the few assumptions and constraints that will decide the result, and you clear them with the customer first. Customers know their goal, they rarely know which constraint binds.You are comfortable in front of a plant manager or a controller, and you can leave