Founding AI Engineer

Before you read further

HelloPrint is on a mission to become the world's leading infrastructure for customizable printed products. From our offices in Rotterdam and Valencia, 120+ professionals from 20+ nationalities are building an AI-first company that scales output faster than headcount. We're at EUR 100M revenue and aiming to disrupt a trillion-dollar industry. Every hire we make needs to help get us there.

• Commercial instinct first, engineering second. You think about what something is worth before you think about how to build it.

• Full-time in Rotterdam. Five days a week, in the building where the transformation is happening. This is not negotiable.

• Always on mentality. This is not a 40-hour job; it’s a deliberate choice into something big that requires “what it takes”

• You have been building since before it was a career. Side projects, tools, systems nobody asked for. The obsession came first.

• You ship continuously. Not when it is ready. Not when it is perfect. When it moves a metric.

With our new approach, we ship in a week what used to take a year, and we are looking for someone who raises that bar further. HelloPrint is not exploring, we are completely transforming into a fully AI-first organisation. The entire platform is being rebuilt from the ground up: new frontend, new pricing engine, new content engine, new product engine; Everything ready for an agentic future. No one on the team writes code manually for what these systems handle.

Why this role exists:

We can find excellent engineers, but what we’re looking for are people for whom building and commercial thinking are not two separate things. As a founding AI engineer, you will work directly alongside our founding team, including Hans (CEO) and Michael (CIO / Chief AI Officer). We have no hierarchy, no management layers and no decision trees. Everyone at HelloPrint builds, the founding team included. The expectation for this role is identical to every other builder: see the highest-impact problem, own it, ship it, measure it, move to the next one.

This role is not for people who got into AI because it became important. It is for people who have been building since before anyone called it a career. The kind of person who coded as a teenager, shipped their first thing before anyone asked, and has never really stopped. Who finds it genuinely difficult to explain why they build: it is just what they do. Who would rather spend a Sunday solving a hard systems problem than almost anything else. If you have to think about whether that description fits you, it probably does not.

This role will resonate with a specific kind of person. You will recognise yourself in one of these profiles:

• You are a technical co-founder or CTO 2 to 4 years into a startup. Your systems work. Your customers are real. But growth has plateaued and the funding environment is harder than expected. You are spending 30 to 40% of your time on things that are not building: investor relations, cap table management, pivot conversations. Your work reaches thousands of users. HelloPrint reaches 600,000.

• Or you are a senior AI builder at a fast-growth scale-up. Technically exceptional. Commercially disconnected. Here every build decision is also a business decision, immediately visible in revenue.

• Or you are building independently: open-source tools, AI SaaS, consulting. Commercially restless. HelloPrint offers better equity, better compensation, and 600,000 customers to build on immediately.

What you will build:

There is no pre-written roadmap. Defining what to build next is part of the job. The opportunity surface is large: 14 markets, 600,000 customers, a platform being rebuilt in parallel across four core engines.

Where the highest-leverage problems live right now:

• Dynamic pricing and margin optimization across 14 markets.

• Agentic procurement: supplier selection, ordering, quality management.

• Customer journey automation from configuration to post-delivery.

• Intelligent content and SEO infrastructure at platform scale.

• Predictive demand and inventory across the supplier network.

• Internal tooling that multiplies the output of every team.

What building looks like here:

• No brief. You identify the opportunity, commercial case first.

• You scope the solution and define the success metric before writing a line of code.

• You build to production standard: monitored, tested, cost-managed.

• Full lifecycle ownership. Live means live, not merged to a branch.

• You measure the commercial outcome and report it as a number.

• You move to the next highest-leverage problem immediately.

Who you are:

The closest reference point is someone who has been building since childhood, not because anyone asked, but because you could not stop. A technical co-founder who has never had anyone to hide behind. Someone who has learned to prioritise by asking 'what is this worth?' before asking 'how do I build it?'. You do not think of yourself as an AI engineer. You think of yourself as someone who solves hard problems and builds the systems to prove it. The engineering is the method. The obsession is the identity.

Three signals that tell us you are that person:

• You have identified and built AI solutions without being assigned them. You saw the commercial leverage, built the solution, and shipped it before anyone validated the idea. Ask you to name one. It takes no time to find.

• Everything you have shipped is in production, monitored, and depended upon. No prototypes. No internal demos. Real systems with real numbers.

• You measure your own work in revenue generated or cost removed. Not in models trained, pipelines built, or features shipped. You knew the commercial value before you built it. You tracked it after.

Must-haves:

• You have been building things since before it was a profession: side projects, tools, systems that nobody assigned but that had to exist.

• Production systems live and depended upon by a real business, built by you personally, not led or supervised.

• Commercial instinct that precedes technical execution: you know the business case before you write the first line.

• Deep fluency in LLMs, agentic workflows, and modern AI infrastructure.

• Strong architectural judgment: you design for failure modes, cost, and scale from the start.

• Autonomous by default: you act without validation, brief, or structure.

• Office-first: this role is on-site in Rotterdam, five days a week.

This role is not for you if you:

• Got into AI because it became an important skill, not because you could not imagine doing anything else.

• Need a brief, a PM, or a defined scope before taking action.

• Measure your output in technical quality or feature count rather than business impact.

• Want to build a team around yourself.

• Would answer 'what would you build first?' with an infrastructure question.

• If you think a workweek of 40h is a lot.

• Prefer hybrid or remote working.

What we offer:

This is not a standard employment offer. Base salary runs from €150,000 to €220,000 gross per year. The performance bonus is uncapped and tied directly to the commercial impact you drive: not to tenure, not to effort, but to what you ship and what it generates. On top of that: 0.5 to 1.5% equity, 4-year vest with a 1-year cliff, in a profitable, cash-generating business already at €100M revenue on an explicit unicorn path. We do not lead with compensation because we do not think that is what moves you. But we built the package so it is never the reason to say no.

• 🎯 Room to grow: opportunities develop fast, within your role and across HelloPrint

• 🌍 The team: 120+ people from 20+ nationalities who build at a pace most companies cannot match. Rotterdam is not a compromise. It is where the work happens.

• 🚀 Real impact: shape the future of a high-growth, AI-driven company where your ideas land in production the same week.

• 💡 Full autonomy from day one: no roadmap to follow, no brief to wait for. You see the problem, you build the solution, you own the outcome.

• 🏃🏻‍♂️‍➡️ Hello-Benefits: including 24/7 HelloFit gym access, UrbanSportsClub discount, the best events and company-sponsored healthy meals every day

Ready to build something? We need bold thinkers, fast executors, and AI-first problem solvers. If that sounds like you, apply now. Let's redefine an industry together.

At HelloPrint, we believe diversity makes us better. We're building a workplace where everyone can be themselves, grow, and do their best work regardless of background, identity, or perspective. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds.