Lead AI Engineer (m/f/d)

<h1><strong>Empower every employee.</strong></h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">Flip is the leading AI-powered employee experience platform for frontline workers. We're transforming how people do their jobs across the industries that keep the world running: retail, manufacturing, and logistics. One app. One touch. Everything they need.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Our mission: Connect every employee to everything they need in one touch.</strong></p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h2>Job Description</h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">AI orchestration is at the centre of where Flip is going. Fusion, a multi-agent code-generation system sits at the core of our newest product, and our Ask AI agent gateway and Flip Flows automation both run on capabilities our AI engineers build and maintain.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">As Lead AI Engineer you take over the AI discipline: you own the <em>how</em> (architecture, standards, technical direction) across all three surfaces, you lead and grow a team of three AI engineers, and you stay hands-on where the problems are hardest.<br /></p><h3>What you can expect</h3><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Own the AI architecture:</strong> Define and align a coherent AI architecture and set of standards across Flip Fusion, Ask AI agent gateway, and Flip Flows.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Tackle the hardest challenge:</strong> Multi-agent systems, built to specific purposes, generalizable enough for diverse customers, balancing high expectations with feasibility, reliability and cost effectiveness.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Lead and grow the discipline:</strong> Take over people leadership for three AI engineers and help them level up into engineers who set the technical bar themselves.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Stay hands-on:</strong> Roughly 70 percent of your time stays in the code, on the problems where your judgment matters most. The rest is technical and people leadership.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Influence across products:</strong> Land architecture decisions with the product managers and engineering leads who own the roadmaps you don't, by making the better argument rather than by mandate.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Work with our stack:</strong> Python, pydantic-ai for orchestration, qdrant for vector search, Azure AI for models, deployed on Kubernetes into a mostly JVM-based (Kotlin, Micronaut) and Go backend.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Shape a young discipline:</strong> AI engineering at Flip is new enough that there is enormous design space and no inherited playbook.<br /></p></li></ul><h3>What you bring to the table</h3><p style="min-height:1.5em">We're looking for an engineer with a software engineering foundation and real production depth in agentic systems, who wants to lead a discipline rather than just work a codebase. If you're excited about the role but don't tick every box, we still want to hear from you.<br /><br /><strong>Must-haves:</strong></p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">7+ years of software engineering experience with a senior or staff-level track record, built on a software engineering foundation (backend, platform, or full-stack)</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Hands-on experience designing, shipping, and operating LLM-powered systems in production: RAG, tool calling and MCP, orchestration, and evals. Not prototypes, systems you lived with after go-live.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Experience with multi-agent orchestration, weighted heavily. This is the core of what you would be architecting.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Demonstrated technical leadership: architecture ownership, tech lead responsibility, RFCs, design reviews, or setting standards for a team.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Proven ability to move technical work you don't own: you win architecture arguments through persuasion and credibility, and you're comfortable being right without being in charge.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Evidence that you grow people: coaching or mentoring engineers into stronger engineers rather than absorbing the work yourself.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">A clear, explicit commitment to people leadership. This role includes managing three engineers and that is not the part you tolerate to get the technical scope.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Strong communication skills and business-fluent English (C1).</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Nice-to-haves:</strong></p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Formal people-management experience: line management, performance and development conversations, hiring. Strong mentoring evidence counts just as much.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Experience leading a discipline or craft across teams in a matrix organisation.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Product context at scale: frontline or deskless workforces, high-volume B2B SaaS, or comparable.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Cost, latency and reliability engineering for LLM systems: guardrails, fallbacks, evaluation harnesses.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">German at any level. Useful in parts of the company, never required for this role.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h3>What we offer you</h3><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Work mode:</strong> We’re remote-first, giving you flexibility to work from home. At the same time, we deeply value the power of in-person collaboration. Depending on the role, you’ll join occasional team events, workshops, or meetings in our Berlin or Stuttgart offices - always with plenty of notice. The exact balance will be discussed during your interview.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Work-Life-Balance:</strong> We don't want you to grow roots to your desk chair. That's why we cover the costs of your E-Gym-Wellpass membership and offer job bike leasing.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Celebrating success:</strong> Expect highly motivated and committed people in a relaxed working atmosphere.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Be part of something bigger</strong>: You actively shape Flip in your role. Along the way, you are an enabler of the rapid growth process of a young tech company and grow towards your goals, fun is guaranteed.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Happy to be a Flipster:</strong> Stay tuned for regular team events and culture days that bring us together as Flipsters.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Working abroad:</strong> At Flip you can also work abroad in the European Union. Let's talk about remote work in the interview.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em">At Flip, everyone is welcome - no matter what gender you identify as or how old you are. Sexual <em>identity</em>, origin, religion, world view and disabilities do not influence your potential job at Flip. The most important thing is that <strong>YOU</strong> fit in!</p><p>Find more <a href="https://www.arbeitnow.com/english-speaking-jobs">English Speaking Jobs in Germany</a> on Arbeitnow</a>