🏎️ TLDR: Cognyx is an early stage VC-backed B2B SaaS startup building groundbreaking technology to accelerate Engineering cycles in Manufacturing. We’re hiring one of our very first employees, and a key member of our “Founding Team”. Our future Founding Data & Software Engineer will design our data foundations and make sure we have the best possible architecture to make our technology as robust and as flexible as possible. S/he will help us embed this data model into our software, leveraging our clients’ proprietary data, and will also pave the way for our future AI/ML strategy, a core of our future offering. So – are you a data wizard with a knack for Knowledge Graphs, AI/ML and ideally PLM’s/ERP’s? Read on!

📌 Location(s): Paris (with some flexibility). Full Remote work is not offered for this position.

💶 Salary range: 70-100k + BSPCE (1st batch, ≈ 0.6%) + intéressement bonus (up to 20% of annual salary upon reaching ARR milestones in 2025). Usual French perks. Quick salary progression, tied with fundraising and/or growth milestones.

📑 Type of Contract: CDI (Contrat à Durée Indéterminée), usual SYNTEC branch perks.

🕵️ Position also known as: (Senior) Data Engineer, Data Architect, Software Architect, Enterprise Data Architect, Data Modeler, Data Solutions Engineer

👏 Direct reporting line: Co-Founder & CTO (Deon van der Vyver)

Why we need you

Cognyx is a powerful platform, solving highly complex organisational and engineering challenges in manufacturing. It has a huge potential for leveraging ML and AI to revolutionise the way hardware engineers work on a daily basis.

In order to achieve this, we are looking for an outstanding professional who can not only contribute his/her expertise in data science and architecture, but also help shape the future of Cognyx, whose performance will lie in leveraging the power of Data. As a Founding Data & Software Engineer, you’ll be at the forefront of our startup’s data and AI journey, leveraging your data expertise to inform our strategic direction, and develop groundbreaking products.

What you’ll do

In a nutshell: as a Founding Data & Software Engineer, you’ll play a key role in developing Cognyx’s initial product, leveraging your data skills to design and deploy the most appropriate data structure, and build data-driven features delivering maximal impact to our Manufacturing clients. You will also help us pave the way for a fast-paced deployment of AI as a core element of our technology.

We think Cognyx is in a privileged position to build an outstanding AI product, applied to the Manufacturing vertical. We think we will gain exclusive access to a lot of proprietary data of our clients, reinforcing our position on the market vs. general AI players. We are also convinced that Engineering is an amazing area to apply AI models, as it contains a lot of structured proprietary data. In many ways, a ‘BOM’ (bill of Materials) resembles to lines of code, AI’s #1 use-case up to now!

Broadly speaking: As a Founding Software & Data Engineer, your role is pivotal. You’ll lead our data architecture vision and journey. Through interactions and research work with Cognyx’s leadership and customers, you will play a key role in preparing Cognyx to deliver our Engineering Intelligence value proposition, identifying domain-specific needs, scoping use cases, and building cutting-edge “ready-to-use” ML/AI solutions. Throughout, you’ll own the continuous reinforcement of delivered assets, including support for user adoption.

On a day to day basis: as a Founding Software & Data Engineer, you can expect to:

Design our Data Architecture and the way it will integrate and interact with our clients’ existing software stack (mainly PLM, ERP’s and MES’).
Lead our Data Journey, shaping our tech vision when it comes to data;
Scope and define our data-enabled features: identifying domain-specific needs, scoping use cases, and building cutting-edge “ready-to-use” solutions
Run advanced Data Analysis: leveraging Knowledge Graph databases, you’ll delve into complex datasets, uncovering hidden patterns and insights that can drive actionable decision-making.
Develop or implement algorithms: driving the development, deployment, and optimization of algorithms for predictive modelling, recommendation systems or anomaly detection, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in data science.

Who you’ll be working with:

As one of our very first employees, you can expect to work closely with each member of our “Founding Core Team”, a small (< 10) problem-solving team who will define our technology, our culture, our value proposition, our processes. This will be an exciting human & professional experience!

You’ll be reporting to Deon, our CTO. Deon is a very experienced founder, with proven leadership skills acquired during his 23 years of experience in Tech.

Why it’ll be fun & interesting to do with us?

Because… there is no one else doing this job! You’ll be an essential reason why we succeed — or fail. As such, you need to take pride in building things yourself – at least until the team further scales.

What’s next in your career?

As one of our first employees, there will be many opportunities to grow in expertise and/or leadership in the months & years to come. Cognyx aims at a high growth rate, so this could come as fast as 6-12 months away!

We will also put a strong emphasis on making sure you are building new skills, whether in terms of tech abilities and leadership. Our experienced founding team will be there to provide extensive guidance & coaching.

Data Science & AI jobs

Founding Data & Software Engineer @ Startup Cognyx