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Who we are
Co-Labs is an impact venture lab in Brussels. We build AI-native ventures, and we help corporates build theirs — Deloitte, KBC, RTBF, the European Commission, the EEAS. Our own portfolio ships under our name: Drimt, Kookia, Call Up, Uptoolkit. We don't advise from the sidelines and hand over a deck. We embed, we operate, and we put our own equity on the line.
We run as an entreprise libérée — self-management, decentralized decisions, freedom paired with responsibility. Every venture carries its own ESOP and vesting. That's not a perk line; it's how the place works.
The role
You'd be one of our first engineering hires and a founding member of the technical team. You'll ship real software across the studio — new ventures going from idea to revenue, and client builds with names you'll recognize. Full-stack, AI-native, in TypeScript end to end. You'll own features, then products, then the standards the next engineers build on.
This is a builder's seat, not a ticket-closer's. You decide how things get built, you ship them, and you live with what you shipped.
What you'll do
- Build and ship AI-native products across our ventures and client work — frontend, backend, and the AI layer in between.
- Design and build agentic and connector systems: tool use, retrieval, MCP integrations, the middleware that makes models useful against real data.
- Take a fuzzy problem from a Co-think workshop to a running pilot in under 90 days.
- Own quality end to end — architecture, tests, security, and the DevSecOps that keeps EU-institutional work compliant.
- Set the technical bar: the patterns, the stack decisions, the standards the team inherits.
- Work in the room with founders, clients, and the rest of us. We build together, often physically.
Our stack
We're TypeScript top to bottom, and we care about the tools:
- Frontend: Next.js, Tailwind, shadcn/ui. Vercel by default.
- Backend: Effect-TS for connector and middleware logic; Hono or NestJS for transport. Google Cloud Run (europe-west1) for compliance-sensitive and institutional workloads.
- AI: model-agnostic; MCP for tool access; agent and retrieval patterns built to actually ship, not to demo.
- Toolchain: Vite+ (
vp), the modern TypeScript build path. - Constraints we design around: EU data residency and GDPR are standing requirements for our institutional clients, not afterthoughts.
You don't need to have used every one of these. You do need to be the kind of engineer who'd be at home in this stack fast.
Who you are
- A senior full-stack engineer who ships. You've built real products that real people use, and you can point to them.
- Fluent in TypeScript across the stack, and comfortable owning both the React frontend and the Node backend.
- AI-native in practice — you've built with LLMs, tool use, agents, or retrieval, and you know where they break.
- Security- and quality-minded. You write tests, you think about data, you don't cut the corners that come back to bite.
- An operator. You take a problem, decide, and ship — without waiting to be told the next step.
- Based in or willing to be in Brussels. We value being in the room. [Confirm remote/hybrid policy]
Nice to have: DevSecOps experience, EU/GDPR-regulated work, an early-stage or founding background, French alongside English, or a portfolio venture of your own.
The deal
- Founding standing. You're early, and the equity reflects it. Cash compensation plus a meaningful equity stake, with a sweat-equity option if you want to trade cash for more of the upside. [Confirm cash range and equity/sweat-equity split]
- Real ownership. ESOP and vesting, and a genuine say in what we build and how.
- Co-Labs 4EVER. Founding members keep a permanent standing in the network — this is a long relationship, not a role you rotate out of.
- Work that matters. Impact ventures, civic and institutional builds, and a cyber-defense lane focused on resilience and sovereignty for critical systems.
- Autonomy. Self-management, no innovation theater, no layers between you and the work.
Who this isn't for
If you want a narrow scope, a long spec handed down, and a queue of tickets, this will frustrate you. If you want to help decide what gets built and then build it — with equity that means you win when we win — this is the seat.
Apply
Send us what you've been proud so far. A few lines on the work you're proudest of and why beat any cover letter.
