Forward Deployed Engineer

Your Impact

Procurement is over 50% of revenue for industrial companies and their biggest lever for profitability. The hard part isn't the software. Every customer's reality is different: a different ERP, a different data model, decades of undocumented process. Generic platforms stall exactly there, and that's where most enterprise AI value quietly dies.

At Tacto, the people who close that gap are Builders who work at the customer edge. You sit inside the customer's environment, build in their production data, and turn what you learn there into product. More than 300 industrial companies already run on Tacto, and every new one teaches us something the platform should do on its own.

Your Tasks

• Prove it with their data. Show a prospect or customer what Tacto finds in their own spend, suppliers and parts, fast enough that the value is obvious.
• Build in customer environments. Data pipelines, agents and custom logic on top of the Tacto platform, in real production data, until the procurement team can actually work with the result.
• Be in the room, on site. Run workshops with buyers and key users, debug alongside their IT, and see how a company really buys instead of how the process documentation says it buys.
• Turn the edge into product. When you solve something twice, ship it into the platform so nobody has to solve it a third time. You're done when it drives revenue, not when the deployment is live.
• Automate your own job. If a step can be done by an agent, you build the agent and prove it works.

Your Profile

• You've built something people relied on: software, automations, agents, or a technical project that real users used.
• You build with AI every day. Cursor, Claude, Codex and agents are your default, and you've built with LLMs against real, messy data.
• You're hands-on with data. SQL and Python at working level, or the drive to get there fast with AI as leverage.
• You thrive in messy environments. Incomplete requirements, undocumented data and conflicting stakeholders don't stop you.
• You earn customer trust. You explain technical decisions clearly, handle pushback, and don't over-promise.
• Early in your career? Good. We bet on people with a steep learning curve, and our senior Builders spend real time making others faster.
• Native-level German and fluent English, based in Munich, happy to travel across DACH.

What This Role Is, and Isn't

We want to be honest about what you are signing up for.

• This is not an engineering role with customers kept at a safe distance. Customer contact is the job, not a tax on the job. If you want a ticket queue and clean requirements, this is the wrong role.
• This is not consulting. Nobody here bills days. You are measured on what the customer can do afterwards and on what made it into the platform.
• It is deliberately broad. If you want to specialise narrowly you will be frustrated here.
• The deal: prove yourself, deliver real impact, make a strong case for yourself, then we back your next step in every way we can.

How the process works

• Say Hello (20 min): get to know each other and the role
• Hiring Manager Interview (45 min)
• On-site day: a case with three Builders and Pool Leads (1 hour), Meet the Team (30 min)

Our Background

Tacto is building the intelligence layer that connects AI to the physical world of manufacturing, starting with procurement. AI is transforming every industry, but it stops at the factory gate. The knowledge that holds manufacturing together - part costs, suppliers, materials - is scattered across systems and people. Over 50% of a product's cost originates from suppliers, making procurement the single largest cost lever in manufacturing and the missing connection between the digital and the physical world. Yet it still runs on Excel and legacy systems. We're changing that with our Procurement Intelligence Platform, trusted by hundreds of companies running billions of Euros of material.

Based in Munich, we are 100+ passionate builders who are in-office, with high expectations, fast growth, and a lot of fun. We are supported by >€50m from Sequoia, Index, and Europe's leading tech entrepreneurs and industry veterans.

Why It Matters

Manufacturing forms Europe's economic backbone, driving a fourth of Europe's GDP and providing over 30% of jobs. These hidden champions and global market leaders manufacture the physical world around us, from the machines that build our cities to the medical devices that save lives.

But the world is changing. The US dominates the digital world of bits. China is scaling the world of atoms, manufacturing at unprecedented speed and scale. Geopolitics are more uncertain than ever. Europe's strength lies in its deep industrial knowledge through generations of engineering. Manufacturing worldwide runs on European machines and software. But that heritage is only an advantage if we leverage it in the age of AI.

Tacto builds the AI that connects Atoms and Bits, empowering our Industrial Base to Stay Stronger and building a lighthouse for European tech.

What We Offer

The people at Tacto are passionate about building the organization, growing themselves, and our product while having fun and being real. We have high expectations, great talent density, and a culture where your ambition, performance, and agency are what count - not where you come from or how big your ego is. You'll grow at the forefront of AI, have real ownership and impact, and be surrounded by the best people in their field who challenge you and make you better every day. That is demanding and rewarding, but that's where we thrive. Besides that you have

• Money: Competitive salary & equity in the company with real upside, so you are invested in our success
• Workplace: A vibrant in-office culture (> 4 days/week) in a beautiful office in central Munich
• Development: A development budget and regular exposure to exceptional people, e.g., Lunch & Learns, peer mentoring, external speakers
• Time off: 26 + 4 vacation days per year (4 fixed “company rest days”) as well as regular off-sites and team events
• Health: Wellpass membership, of course, a fruit basket (!), and access to Jobrad, for your health
• Family & Social Security: Voluntary pension contribution, voluntary KITA subsidy for your children

Tacto is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, or gender identity. Please do not submit personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, data concerning your health, or data concerning your sexual orientation.