Applied Operations Research Engineer

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential optimization software company based in Germany that is building decision-making infrastructure for industrial organizations. Our client tackles complex combinatorial problems in production planning and supply chain optimization.

This is a hands-on role where you will own customer models end-to-end, bridge the gap between mathematical optimization and production software, and build the engine that powers critical business decisions for manufacturing clients.

Responsibilities

• Translate real-world industrial planning problems into optimization models, working with production capacities, costs, lead times, and constraints
• Process and validate customer data from ERP systems and Excel exports, ensuring data quality before models run
• Design and maintain the interface between software engineering and mathematical optimization, creating abstractions that allow engineers and customers to build models independently
• Develop solutions that produce actionable answers for planners, including explanations of infeasibility and trade-off analysis
• Scale optimization workloads to handle multiple sites, extended planning horizons, and concurrent customer usage
• Own features from initial design through production deployment and ongoing operation
• Collaborate closely with the mathematics and operations research team to implement and optimize solver strategies

What We're Looking For

• Production experience with combinatorial optimization in industry using MILP, constraint programming, or both
• Proven ability to ship optimization algorithms that handle messy real-world data and user requirements
• Deep knowledge of solver limitations and optimization techniques including warm starts, rolling horizon, relax-and-fix, aggregation, matheuristics, and heuristics
• Experience running optimization workloads with real-time constraints: cancellation handling, timeouts, and parallel execution
• Production-quality Python development including testing, type hints, code review practices, and performance profiling
• Understanding of numerical issues in optimization: scaling, tolerances, integrality constraints, and numerical precision
• Strong customer focus and willingness to understand business problems, not just mathematical models
• Team collaboration experience in a professional software development environment
• German language proficiency at C1 level or higher, plus fluent English
• Based in or willing to relocate to NRW (Cologne office), Munich, Stuttgart, or Berlin area with hybrid work arrangement

Bonus qualifications: solver internals knowledge, performance optimization on numerical or compiled code, DSL or compiler experience, domain expertise in production planning or supply chain, structured working style with bias for action.

This role is not suitable if you: prioritize research freedom over product delivery, prefer comprehensive rewrites to incremental measurement, want to work only within defined abstractions without touching data, or prefer task assignment over self-direction.

How We Work With You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our talent team will conduct an initial screening to understand your background in operations research and optimization. We'll discuss your experience building production optimization models and the technical decisions you've made in past projects.

After our screening, we will coordinate your interview process with our client, which includes technical conversations, a hands-on modeling challenge, and meetings with the team. The process typically runs two to three weeks with feedback provided within days after each stage.

Please do not attempt to contact the client directly. All communication and coordination will run through Get A Job.ai to ensure a professional candidate experience.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process based on your experience level and qualifications. Our client offers competitive salary, meaningful equity participation (VSOP), hardware of your choice, AI tooling budget, sports membership, and Deutschland-Ticket.

Equal Opportunity

Get A Job.ai is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic. We value diversity and encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds.