Lead AI Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Netherlands.

📋 Description

• Define the technical vision for AYBI's AI and GenAI initiatives, including the architecture, decisions on build-vs-buy, and the prudent assessment of when AI may not be the appropriate solution.

• Develop and implement AI into our products and client solutions, including LLM applications, RAG utilizing complex real-world data, agents, and tool-calling, ensuring they are production-ready rather than merely demo-ready.

• Take ownership of reliability: establish evaluations as the unit tests for our AI (eval suites in CI, golden datasets), ensure observability and tracing for every call, and implement safeguards against hallucination and prompt injection.

• Maintain AI affordability: monitor cost and latency for each task, employing caching, routing, and selecting the most suitable model for the task instead of opting for the largest one.

• Spearhead the productization initiative the team is embarking on, transforming one-off work into repeatable, observable, and reliable products, complemented by appropriate testing and monitoring.

• Elevate the engineers within your team through skill development, clear guidance, and occasional workshops, aiding the entire team in effectively adopting AI technologies.

• Your leadership is defined by your roles and responsibilities rather than a traditional reporting structure; we practice self-organization.

• Convert AI capabilities into tangible client value and challenge any endeavors that prioritize AI for its own sake.

• Stay informed about the latest advancements: read emerging literature, experiment with promising innovations, and bring back valuable insights.

⛳️ Requirements

• Attitude: a blend of energy and curiosity. You infuse positive energy into every interaction and prefer delivering something impactful over perfecting something that is not useful.

• Experience: approximately 3–5 years in software engineering, focusing on building and deploying AI/ML or GenAI systems in a production environment.

• Hands-on AI/ML engineering experience in production: you have developed and deployed LLM/GenAI systems utilized by actual users, including RAG, agents, and tool-calling, rather than just theoretical notebooks and demonstrations.

• Proficient in Python, and well-versed in the contemporary AI stack (LLM APIs from providers like Anthropic / OpenAI / open models, vector databases, and orchestration frameworks), with a good understanding of potential pitfalls.

• Reliability & LLMOps: you ensure AI systems are reliable through evaluations, observability, tracing, safeguards, prompt and version control, as well as managing cost and latency budgets.

• Technical leadership: you establish the technical direction that others support, make architectural decisions, and enhance the capabilities of those around you through influence and clarity, rather than authority.

• Client & business acumen: you can differentiate between AI that delivers client value and AI that is merely hype, and you can articulate these distinctions to a non-technical audience.

• Self-management: you excel in an environment without direct supervision. You embrace distributed authority, take ownership of your roles, address and resolve conflicts, and adapt your work as necessary, viewing this as freedom rather than disorder.

• Strong communication skills in English.

• Nice to have: a background in data or business intelligence, consultancy experience, cloud and deployment expertise (AWS / Azure / GCP, Docker, CI/CD), familiarity with model distillation, structured outputs, and multimodal pipelines.

🏝️ Benefits

• A competitive salary ranging from €7,400–€9,200 per month, plus an impact bonus, profit sharing, pension (for NL employees), a €5,000 annual development budget, an 8% holiday allowance (for NL employees), a €500 home-office budget, a laptop, team outings, informal gatherings, and the occasional well-deserved "Hey, well done Buddy!"

• 25 vacation days, public holidays, special leave, the option to purchase up to 10 additional days, and a sabbatical of up to 4 months.

• Remote working flexibility: as long as you are within a similar time zone, and you attend every quarterly company meeting in the Netherlands or abroad.