Germany has around 130,000 bridges and a growing share of them are in bad shape. The Carolabrücke in Dresden collapsed in 2024. The Rheinbrücke Bonn-Nord was closed completely in June 2026. Every one of these bridges has to be inspected under DIN 1076: a full inspection every 6 years, a simple one every 3, a visual check every year.

Today that means scaffolding, rope access, and often a clipboard and an engineer's handwritten note. The results aren't comparable between inspections. Nobody can tell you whether that crack got wider since 2021.

We're fixing that with a drone, a modular sensor payload (LiDAR, RGB, later ultrasound and thermal), and software that turns the flight into a digital twin with the defects marked on it.

Your responsibilities

• Lead AI Development: Design, build, and deploy computer vision and spatial/temporal models for automated damage detection on infrastructure

• Data Pipeline Development: Create efficient end-to-end data processing pipelines for automated multi-sensor analysis and edge/cloud model training.

• Technical Strategy: Define our long-term software architecture

• Software Layer 

• The comparison: same bridge, three years apart. What changed, and by how much.

• The digital twin: point cloud in, something an inspection engineer can click through, out.

Must-haves

• University degree in Computer Science (or a related field) with practical experience in Machine Learning and Computer Vision algorithms.

• Possess a founder mindset and readiness to take full technical ownership.

• Hands-on experience writing clean, deployable code and solving complex technical edge cases.

• Built and shipped a real backend. APIs, a database, storage, a pipeline that chews through large data without falling over.

Helpful, not required: point clouds, LiDAR or photogrammetry. Jetson. Anything from construction, drones or civil engineering. German.

The deal

• Equal share of the company. A third each, with vesting. No salary until we secured grants. 

• Honest about the timing: between now and the EXIST stipend (roughly Q1 2027) we're asking for around 10 to 20 hours a week next to your job, unpaid, for equity. From the stipend onwards, full time.

• You need to qualify for EXIST: You live in Germany. 

• Work from wherever. We'd like you to be open to moving when EXIST starts, most likely Munich or Berlin.

Interested?

Send whatever shows the work best: a repo, a paper, a project you'd tell a friend about. Tell us the hardest thing you've shipped and what broke.