Lead AI Engineer (m/f/d)
About this role
Empower every employee.
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.
Our mission: Connect every employee to everything they need in one touch.
Job Description
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.
As Lead AI Engineer you take over the AI discipline: you own the how (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.
What you can expect
Own the AI architecture: Define and align a coherent AI architecture and set of standards across Flip Fusion, Ask AI agent gateway, and Flip Flows.
Tackle the hardest challenge: Multi-agent systems, built to specific purposes, generalizable enough for diverse customers, balancing high expectations with feasibility, reliability and cost effectiveness.
Lead and grow the discipline: Take over people leadership for three AI engineers and help them level up into engineers who set the technical bar themselves.
Stay hands-on: 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.
Influence across products: 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.
Work with our stack: 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.
Shape a young discipline: AI engineering at Flip is new enough that there is enormous design space and no inherited playbook.
What you bring to the table
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.
Must-haves:
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)
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.
Experience with multi-agent orchestration, weighted heavily. This is the core of what you would be architecting.
Demonstrated technical leadership: architecture ownership, tech lead responsibility, RFCs, design reviews, or setting standards for a team.
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.
Evidence that you grow people: coaching or mentoring engineers into stronger engineers rather than absorbing the work yourself.
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.
Strong communication skills and business-fluent English (C1).
Nice-to-haves:
Formal people-management experience: line management, performance and development conversations, hiring. Strong mentoring evidence counts just as much.
Experience leading a discipline or craft across teams in a matrix organisation.
Product context at scale: frontline or deskless workforces, high-volume B2B SaaS, or comparable.
Cost, latency and reliability engineering for LLM systems: guardrails, fallbacks, evaluation harnesses.
German at any level. Useful in parts of the company, never required for this role.
What we offer you
Work mode: 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.
Work-Life-Balance: 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.
Celebrating success: Expect highly motivated and committed people in a relaxed working atmosphere.
Be part of something bigger: 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.
Happy to be a Flipster: Stay tuned for regular team events and culture days that bring us together as Flipsters.
Working abroad: At Flip you can also work abroad in the European Union. Let's talk about remote work in the interview.
At Flip, everyone is welcome - no matter what gender you identify as or how old you are. Sexual identity, origin, religion, world view and disabilities do not influence your potential job at Flip. The most important thing is that YOU fit in!
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