€72 billion worth of fresh food is wasted every year in European grocery retail. Freshflow is building the AI Operating System for the Fresh Food Supply Chain — starting with ordering and inventory optimization for fresh produce departments. We work with some of the largest retailers in Germany and France — EDEKA, REWE, Carrefour, and more — reducing waste by ~24% while improving on-shelf availability. We're growing revenues 400% year-over-year, backed by WorldFund and Capnamic, and just getting started.
The Role
The Solutions Architect/Forward Deployed Engineer is not a normal engineering job. You won't sit in a sprint planning meeting debating story points. You will be Freshflow's face to some of the largest grocery retailers in Europe — multibillion euro companies like EDEKA, REWE, and Carrefour — sitting across the table from their C-suite, presenting to their executive board, and owning the relationship end-to-end. Most people your age are three layers removed from any real decision-maker. You'll be in the room with them, eye-to-eye, showing them how your work is transforming their business. And then you'll go back to your laptop and build what you just promised.
You are the single point of execution for your account. You wear a product manager hat when scoping requirements with their leadership. You wear an engineer hat when writing Python and SQL. You wear a data scientist hat when analyzing performance across hundreds of stores. You wear a customer success hat when presenting results to their board. There is no "that's not my job." Think of it as running a tiny startup inside a startup — except your customer is a household-name retailer doing billions in revenue, and your only metric is: do they expand, or do they churn?
What You'll Actually Do
* Own 1–2 enterprise accounts — each a major European grocery chain with thousands of stores and billions in annual revenue
* Sit in meetings with C-level executives, regional directors, and category heads — presenting your work, defending your recommendations, and shaping how they think about AI in their fresh food operations
* Build and ship features in Python — custom analyses, dashboards, integrations into retailer ERP/ordering systems, data pipelines
* Build and maintain robust data pipelines and dbt models in our BigQuery data warehouse — ingesting messy retailer data, transforming it into clean, trustworthy tables, and making sure your analyses sit on solid foundations
* Write complex SQL queries against our BigQuery data warehouse to surface insights on waste, stockouts, and order accuracy across hundreds of stores
* Run deep data analyses that prove ROI and drive account expansion — shrink reduction, acceptance rate improvements, counterfactual impact studies worth millions in savings
* Translate executive-level requirements into product improvements, working closely with the core engineering and data science teams
* Present strategic recommendations to customer leadership — not in a support capacity, but as a trusted advisor they rely on
* Travel to customer HQs, warehouses, and stores across Germany (and occasionally France) — up to 50% of your time
What We're Looking For
* Extremely familiar with the latest agentic AI tooling — you already use tools like ClaudeCode, Cursor, or similar AI-powered development environments daily. You don't just prompt — you build with AI as a force multiplier. This is non-negotiable: we expect you to ship at 5x the speed of a traditional engineer because you know how to leverage these tools.
* Native-level German — you will be the face of Freshflow to German retail executives and store managers. No exceptions, minimum C1-level German.
* Strong English — internal communication and documentation is in English.
* Python proficiency — you can build production-quality scripts, data pipelines, and lightweight applications, not just notebooks.
* SQL proficiency — you're comfortable writing complex queries across large datasets (BigQuery experience is a strong plus).
* Airflow — you've built and maintained production data pipelines and DAGs.
* dbt — you can build modular, well-tested models in a real data warehouse.
* Data analysis / data science chops — you can wrangle messy real-world data, build analyses that actually drive decisions, and present findings clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
* Product instinct — you naturally think about what the customer actually needs, not just what they ask for. You can prioritize ruthlessly.
* Communication skills — you can hold your own in a room with a CEO twice your age and leave them feeling confident in you. You write clearly. You follow up relentlessly.
* Willingness to grind — this role is intense. You will sometimes work late to hit a customer deadline. You will travel to a warehouse in rural Germany on a Tuesday morning. You will debug a data pipeline on a Friday evening because a store manager needs numbers for Monday. If that sounds terrible, this isn't for you.
Compensation
* Significant performance bonuses tied to Net Revenue Retention (NRR) — if your accounts expand and renew, you earn substantially more. We're serious about this: a high performing FDE in this role can earn well over €100K total comp, regardless of age or years of experience.
* Equity participation (VSOP)
* The usual — 30 days vacation, equipment budget
Who Thrives in This Role
You're probably early in your career — maybe 1–4 years out of university — but you've already shown that you can ship things independently and take ownership of outcomes, not just tasks. You might have been the best-performing analyst at a consulting firm who got bored of slide decks, or a data engineer at a startup who wanted to be closer to customers, or a CS grad who spent a gap year building side projects and freelancing. You're not looking for a comfortable 9-to-5. You want skin in the game — and you want direct access to the kind of decision-makers most people don't meet until they're a decade into their career.
How to Apply
Send us your CV along with a short note (max 5 sentences) on why this role excites you. Bonus points if you link to something you've built or shipped.
We are committed to diversity and inclusivity in our hiring practices.
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