Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Principal AI Engineer

Location: Berlin, Germany (Hybrid)

Type: Full-time

Salary: up to €120,000

About Us

We’re working with a fast-scaling AI company based in Berlin, on a mission to redefine how intelligent systems integrate into everyday business operations. Fresh off the back of a €10M Series A round led by top-tier investors, they are entering an ambitious phase of product expansion and R&D acceleration.

Their team combines top talent from leading AI labs, startups, and global tech companies. They're building advanced AI infrastructure and applications that push the limits of performance, scalability, and interoperability, all while keeping ethics and usability at the core.

If you’re looking for a role where you’ll shape core architecture, guide strategic decisions, and pioneer cutting-edge AI systems, this is it.

The Role

As a Principal AI Engineer, you’ll lead the development of state-of-the-art AI systems, working closely with research, product, and engineering teams. You’ll design and deploy scalable machine learning pipelines, lead architecture for generative and retrieval systems, and mentor a team of talented engineers and applied scientists.

This isn’t a maintenance role, it’s about inventing, optimizing, and operationalizing at scale. You’ll make key decisions on model selection, infrastructure, and system design that will define how our AI evolves over the next several years.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement large-scale AI and ML systems — from model architecture to distributed training and deployment in production.
• Collaborate with research teams to translate cutting-edge findings into robust, scalable applications.
• Architect and optimize data pipelines, ensuring efficient preprocessing, feature extraction, and real-time inference.
• Drive experimentation in foundation model adaptation, fine-tuning, and evaluation across multi-modal data (text, vision, audio).
• Mentor and lead senior engineers and applied scientists, fostering a culture of technical excellence and innovation.
• Own performance, reliability, and scalability of AI models in production.
• Partner with product leadership to align technical roadmap with business priorities and customer needs.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years specialized in machine learning or AI systems.
• Proven experience designing and scaling ML infrastructure, model training, deployment, and monitoring in production environments.
• Deep expertise in Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, and experience with distributed systems (Ray, Kubernetes, Spark, etc.).
• Track record of leading end-to-end AI system architecture, from data ingestion to inference serving.
• Strong grounding in ML theory, deep learning, and MLOps best practices.
• Experience working with large language models (LLMs) or multi-modal AI is highly desirable.
• Previous experience at a startup or scale-up is a plus, you thrive in ambiguity and build with velocity.

Why Join Us

• Be part of a high-impact engineering team shaping the AI backbone of a rapidly growing European tech company.
• Collaborate with world-class researchers and engineers.
• Competitive compensation, stock options, and the chance to have a foundational impact on a product used globally.
• A modern, collaborative environment in the heart of Berlin, with flexibility and autonomy baked in.