Head of AI Engineering (f/m/x)

About This Opportunity

Our talent team is representing a confidential fintech organization based in Frankfurt am Main. We are searching for an exceptional Head of AI Engineering to lead and transform a machine learning team of 15–20 engineers from research-focused work into a high-throughput, production-grade organization delivering reliable AI features at scale.

You will partner directly with executive leadership on technical strategy, build unified platform infrastructure for LLM access and RAG pipelines, and establish engineering practices that support rapid, reliable delivery of AI-powered features.

Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Organization

• Hire, mentor, and develop a high-performing engineering team while setting technical standards and operating rhythms
• Organize sub-teams with clear ownership, SLOs, and on-call responsibilities
• Manage roadmap planning, capacity allocation, and delivery across parallel initiatives

Architecture & Platform Engineering

• Own unified LLM gateway with multi-provider routing, rate limiting, fallbacks, and cost tracking
• Build high-performance RAG pipelines including ingestion, embeddings, vector stores, and caching with robust observability
• Partner with backend teams to define async contracts, schemas, and eventing patterns for low-latency, scalable inference

Model Lifecycle & Operations

• Lead end-to-end model and prompt lifecycle from data curation through deployment and rollback
• Establish LLMOps/MLOps practices including registries, CI/CD, canary testing, A/B testing, and drift monitoring
• Optimize inference throughput and costs through autoscaling, batching, quantization, and caching strategies

Strategy & Collaboration

• Translate business objectives into measurable AI/ML roadmaps balancing innovation with reliability and cost efficiency
• Own build-versus-buy decisions for models, infrastructure, and data services; manage vendor relationships and budgets

Governance & Security

• Implement data privacy, security, and compliance practices including RBAC, secrets management, and auditability
• Define incident response procedures, runbooks, and postmortem processes for AI systems

What We're Looking For

Required Experience & Skills

• 5+ years as a backend engineer and 4+ years leading AI/ML engineering in production environments (10+ years total experience ideal)
• Deep architecture expertise in Java (JVM) and/or Node.js (NestJS), distributed systems, APIs, microservices, and messaging/streaming
• Hands-on experience with LLM orchestration frameworks, vector databases (Pinecone, Qdrant, FAISS), and cloud AI platforms (AWS Bedrock)
• Proven track record operating systems at scale (millions of daily API calls) with strong SLOs, observability, and incident management
• MLOps foundations including model registries, experiment tracking, CI/CD, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management abilities with strong product sense
• Fluent German and English for daily collaboration, stakeholder engagement, and technical documentation

Preferred Experience

• GPU/accelerator serving and optimization experience (vLLM, TGI, Triton, ONNX Runtime)
• Cost optimization for LLM workloads including token budgets, dynamic routing, and caching strategies
• Evaluation frameworks and safety/red-teaming for generative systems
• Startup or high-growth environment experience

Technology Stack

• Backend: Java (JVM), Node.js (NestJS), event-driven microservices, API gateways
• AI Platform: Python, PyTorch, LLM orchestration, vector databases, RAG services
• Infrastructure: AWS (including Bedrock), Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana

Location & Work Authorization

This position is based in Frankfurt am Main. Candidates must have existing right to work in the EU; visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

How We Work With You

Candidates apply directly through Get A Job.ai. Our recruiting team will conduct an initial screening to understand your background and ensure alignment with the role requirements. Qualified candidates will then be submitted to our client for consideration. Please do not attempt to contact the employer directly, as all communication must flow through our process to preserve candidate integrity.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process and are competitive with senior leadership roles in the fintech sector.

Equal Opportunity

Get A Job.ai is committed to inclusive hiring practices and equal employment opportunity. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected characteristic.