Founding Engineer — AI/Data Platform for Global B2B Vendor Discovery

Job Description

Crisscross is building a new AI-powered platform for B2B professional services discovery, vendor intelligence, and advertising.

B2B advertising has a fundamental data problem: the most valuable buying signals happen before a vendor is contacted, but today those signals are mostly invisible. Crisscross is designed to capture live vendor-selection behavior — discovery, comparison, shortlisting, and RFI activity — and turn it into the missing intent layer for B2B professional services.

The first product is an AI-built discovery platform that helps companies find and evaluate the right professional-services vendors by category and market. Behind that product is a much larger technical challenge: building a global taxonomy of B2B service providers across 133 professional-services categories, every major global metropolitan area, and hundreds of capabilities, specialties, and buyer needs.

This means integrating public web data, private databases, structured taxonomies, AI-assisted research workflows, and auto-surveying tools to create continuously refreshed vendor intelligence at scale.

We are looking for a Founding Engineer to help build the first version of this platform from zero to one.

This is not a narrow engineering role. You will help design the core architecture, build the MVP, make foundational product and data decisions, and work directly with the founder on one of the largest under-digitized markets in B2B: professional services.

Key responsibilities:

  • Build the first working Crisscross MVP across front end, back end, database, AI workflows, and internal tools.

  • Design the data architecture for a global vendor taxonomy covering 133 categories, major metros, vendors, capabilities, rankings, and buyer needs.

  • Build AI-assisted workflows for data extraction, classification, enrichment, normalization, and quality control.

  • Integrate public web data, private databases, APIs, and auto-surveying tools to build structured vendor intelligence.

  • Create scalable templates for category/metro pages, vendor profiles, buyer guides, comparison flows, and RFI workflows.

  • Help build the systems that capture buyer behavior: page views, profile engagement, comparisons, shortlists, RFI activity, and intent signals.

  • Work with the founder to define what should be built manually, automated with AI, or deferred.

  • Make pragmatic technical decisions that allow us to launch quickly while keeping the architecture scalable.

Crisscross is currently based at Station F in Paris. This is an early founding role for someone who wants meaningful ownership and upside and is excited by the chance to help build a category-defining company from the beginning. Crisscross is currently pre-seed, so this is an equity-first founding role with salary planned after financing.

Preferred Experience

We are looking for a highly practical builder who can move fast, work through ambiguity, and take ownership of a complex product.

Ideal background:

  • Strong full-stack engineering experience.

  • Experience with modern web frameworks such as React, Next.js, Node.js, Python, FastAPI, Django, PostgreSQL, Supabase, or similar.

  • Experience building MVPs, SaaS products, marketplaces, directories, data products, workflow tools, or AI-enabled applications.

  • Comfort designing data models, APIs, admin tools, authentication, and scalable web architectures.

  • Experience using LLMs or AI APIs for data extraction, classification, summarization, enrichment, automation, or agentic workflows.

  • Ability to work with messy real-world data from multiple sources.

  • Strong product judgment and willingness to make practical tradeoffs.

  • Interest in B2B, AI, marketplaces, vendor discovery, advertising, data infrastructure, or professional services.

  • Comfortable joining before funding as an equity-first founding team member.

Bonus experience:

  • SEO-oriented products or large-scale programmatic page generation.

  • Web scraping, data pipelines, entity resolution, taxonomy building, or knowledge graphs.

  • CRM, ad tech, marketing automation, or intent-data products.

  • Experience with D&B, LinkedIn, Clearbit, Apollo, HubSpot, Salesforce, or similar B2B data/workflow platforms.

  • Previous startup founding, early-employee, or zero-to-one product experience.

What matters most is not a perfect résumé. It is the ability to build, learn quickly, make decisions, and turn a large product vision into a working platform.

Recruitment Process

The process will be lightweight and practical:

  • Intro conversation about Crisscross, the MVP, and your background.

  • Working discussion on how we would approach the first build.

  • Mutual fit conversation around role scope, commitment, equity, and timing.

No corporate hiring process. The goal is to see whether there is enough founder-level alignment to start building together.

Additional Information

  • Contract Type: Other
  • Location: Paris
  • Possible full remote