Technical Ex-Founder

You have started a company before. Maybe it worked, maybe it did not. Either way you know what it is like to own everything, ship before it is ready, sell to a skeptical customer and fix production at midnight. We want that person, without the fundraising.

What we do

Wasteer puts computer vision and machine learning on the waste stream at European waste-to-energy plants. Cameras watch the bunker, the crane and the tipping floor. Our models classify what is actually in the waste, flag contaminants the operator would otherwise miss, and guide how the bunker is mixed and fed. Inference runs at the edge, on live industrial hardware, in real time.

Wasteer is post-revenue, with paying customers running plants that handle 16 percent of Europe's waste. The core product exists and runs every day. The next products do not exist yet. You will build them with the founders.

Why this and not your next company

• The hard part of the start is done. Customers, plants, cameras on site, data flowing. You skip the year of finding someone who will let you in.
• The problem is big and unglamorous. Heavy industry, regulated, physical. Few software people go there, which is exactly why it is open.
• You still own outcomes, not tickets. We tell you the problem. The approach, the stack and the trade-offs are yours.

What you will do

• Take a new product line from idea to a plant using it daily: talk to operators, scope it, build it, ship it, measure it.
• Work across the whole stack: edge services next to the crane, the backend and data behind them, and the screens in the control room.
• Spend time on site at customer plants. That is where we learn what to build.
• Make the calls a founder makes: what to build now, what to fake, what to kill.
• As the team grows, lead the people building what you started.

What we look for

Must have

• You founded or co-founded a company and were the technical lead: you wrote much of the code that shipped.
• You have built and run real software in production, end to end.
• You can go from a vague problem to something a customer uses, without a spec.
• You are comfortable in front of customers, including people in hard hats who do not care about software.

Nice to have

• Computer vision, machine learning or data-heavy products.
• Hardware, industrial, IoT or edge systems.
• Selling to enterprise or industrial customers.
• German.

Not a fit if

• You are looking for a CTO title on day one. Scope here grows with what you build.
• You want a defined backlog and a clear boundary between your job and everyone else's.
• You are mainly here to raise your next round on the side.

How we work

• We work on site with our customers. Shipped is not done: it is done when a plant uses it in its daily work.
• For an unproven idea, quick and dirty wins. Once it is proven, it gets built to last.
• Facts over feelings: numbers with units, errors with next steps.
• Hybrid work from our Berlin office. Dogs are welcome.

How we hire

Apply with your CV and a few lines about what you built before and what happened to it. We read every application ourselves. Then a screening, a case study from a real plant problem, a session presenting it to the team, and a conversation with the founders. About three weeks from application to offer.