Lead AI Engineer - Generative AI & NLP (€85,000 - €100,000)

Location: Germany (Hybrid – regular remote working)

Employment Type: Permanent

Salary: Competitive, transparent salary bands

Visa Sponsorship Unavailable

A leading European data and AI consultancy is supporting organisations across multiple industries with large-scale digital transformation initiatives. With a strong track record delivering production-grade data, machine learning, and AI solutions, the company partners with both mid-sized businesses and global enterprises to unlock value from data.

The team is now looking for a Lead AI Engineer with deep expertise in NLP, LLMs, and Generative AI to act as a subject matter expert across multiple client engagements and internal initiatives.

The Role

You’ll operate as a technical authority for NLP and Generative AI, supporting high-impact customer projects while shaping internal capabilities and offerings. This is a senior, hands-on role combining technical leadership, solution design, mentoring, and client-facing advisory work.

You’ll design and deliver scalable, production-ready GenAI systems while helping teams and clients navigate trade-offs around performance, latency, cost, and complexity.

What You’ll Be Doing

Technical Leadership and Expertise

• Act as a subject matter expert and force multiplier for NLP, LLM, and agent-based systems across multiple projects.
• Take end-to-end ownership of one or more focus areas within NLP and Generative AI.
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for complex AI topics.

Solution Design and Delivery

• Lead the technical design of NLP and GenAI systems addressing real-world business challenges.
• Architect solutions with a strong focus on scalability, robustness, latency, and cost efficiency.
• Ensure AI systems are production-ready and meet enterprise-grade standards.

Client and Stakeholder Engagement

• Work as a technical lead on customer projects, collaborating closely with client stakeholders.
• Present solution concepts and guide technical discussions during delivery, proposal, and acquisition phases.
• Translate complex AI concepts for both technical and non-technical audiences.

Mentorship and Team Enablement

• Guide and support less experienced team members.
• Provide constructive feedback and hands-on mentoring.
• Contribute to building internal best practices and standards.

Innovation and Thought Leadership

• Contribute to internal product development and expansion of the GenAI service portfolio.
• Support technical marketing, enablement, and thought leadership activities.
• Continuously track advancements in NLP, LLMs, tools, and research and apply them in practice.

What We’re Looking For

Core Experience

• 5+ years of professional experience in data science, NLP, machine learning, or Generative AI.
• Proven experience building and deploying NLP- and LLM-based systems in production environments.
• Deep knowledge of LLM APIs, agent frameworks, vector databases, retrieval approaches, and evaluation techniques.
• Strong experience with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Hands-on experience with fine-tuning, post-training, and inference-time optimisation.

Engineering and Architecture

• Ability to write clean, performant, and scalable production code.
• Experience designing cloud-based architectures.
• Familiarity with MLOps, CI/CD, and deployment workflows on AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Consulting and Communication

• Confident acting as a technical counterpart to customers.
• Strong communication skills across technical and business audiences.
• Structured, proactive, and independent working style.

Languages

• Very good German and English skills (C1 level or higher).

What’s On Offer

• Challenging data and AI projects across a wide range of industries
• Clear opportunities for professional and personal development
• Structured feedback, learning paths, and mentoring programmes
• Open, collaborative culture with flat hierarchies and fast decision-making
• Flexible hybrid working with a modern office base in Germany
• Transparent and market-aligned salary bands
• Additional benefits including mobility support, wellness programmes, high-quality equipment, and regular team events