Head of AI Engineering (f/m/x)

Responsibilities

We are representing a confidential fintech organization seeking a Head of AI Engineering to own and scale their AI engineering function. You will transform a research-focused ML team into a high-throughput, production-grade organization delivering reliable, scalable AI features.

Team Leadership and Organization

• Hire, mentor, and develop a high-performing team of 15–20 ML engineers; set technical standards, operating rhythms, and code/research review practices
• Organize sub-teams (Core Modeling, AI Platform/Infrastructure, Integrations) with clear ownership, SLOs, and on-call responsibilities
• Manage roadmap, capacity planning, and delivery across parallel initiatives

Architecture and Platform

• Own the LLM gateway: unified APIs and proxy layers for multi-provider routing (OpenAI, Gemini, Bedrock) with rate limits, fallbacks, and cost tracking
• Build high-performance RAG pipelines (ingestion, embeddings, vector stores, caching) with robust observability and safety guardrails
• Partner with Java/NestJS teams to define clean async contracts, schemas, and eventing patterns; drive low-latency, scalable inference

Model Lifecycle and Operations

• Lead end-to-end model and prompt lifecycle: data curation, training/fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, rollback
• Establish LLMOps/MLOps: model/prompt registries, CI/CD, canary/A/B tests, offline/online evaluations, drift and cost monitoring
• Optimize inference throughput and cost (autoscaling, batching, quantization/distillation, caching)

Strategy and Collaboration

• Translate company goals into an AI/ML roadmap with measurable outcomes; balance exploration with reliability and cost
• Own build-vs-buy/vendor strategy for models, infrastructure, and data services; manage budgets and SLAs

Governance and Security

• Implement data privacy, security, and compliance practices (RBAC, secrets, auditability); track prompt/model lineage and reproducibility
• Define incident response, runbooks, and postmortems for AI features

What We're Looking For

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years as a backend engineer and 4+ years leading AI/ML engineering in production (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 stacks: orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain/LlamaIndex or custom), vector databases (Pinecone, Qdrant, FAISS), cloud AI services (e.g., AWS Bedrock)
• Proven operation of systems at scale (millions of daily API calls) with strong SLOs, observability, and incident management
• MLOps foundations: model registries, experiment tracking, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform), security best practices
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills; strong product sense focused on shipping user-facing features
• Fluent German and English for daily team collaboration, stakeholder management, and technical documentation
• Candidates must have the right to work in the EU; visa sponsorship is not provided for this role

Nice to Have

• Experience with GPU/accelerator serving and optimization (vLLM, TGI, Triton, ONNX Runtime)
• Cost optimization for LLM workloads (token budgets, dynamic routing, caching)
• Evaluation 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/proxies
• AI Platform: Python, PyTorch, LLM orchestration, prompt pipelines/registry; vector databases (Pinecone, Qdrant); RAG services
• Infrastructure/DevOps: AWS (including Bedrock), Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, Observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana)

How We Work With You

Our talent team at Get A Job.ai will guide you through every step of the process. When you apply through our platform, a dedicated recruiter will screen your profile and coordinate directly with our client. We'll prepare you for interviews, provide feedback, and advocate on your behalf throughout the hiring process. Please apply exclusively through Get A Job.ai—direct contact with the client is not permitted and may disqualify your application.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process with our recruiting team.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Get A Job.ai is committed to inclusive hiring practices and equal opportunity employment. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds to apply.