AI Engineering Practice Lead 80-100% (w/m/d)

3 days ago

Zürich, SwitzerlandStaff+

Responsibilities

Build shared AI platform foundations, including agent frameworks, tool and data integrations, evaluation pipelines, and governance.
Lead the technical implementation of agentic systems using tool calling, multi-step workflows, orchestration, state and memory management, and enterprise integrations.
Take AI agent projects from design through production and establish standards for evaluation, guardrails, human-in-the-loop design, security, cost, and latency.
Define reference architectures, reusable components, and engineering best practices for the AI Engineering practice.
Review designs and code, mentor engineers, and provide functional technical leadership.
Participate in client scoping, effort estimation, technical pre-sales, and communication of technical trade-offs.
Assess new models, agent frameworks, and protocols such as MCP for production readiness.

At least 5 years of experience in software, data, or ML engineering.
Significant hands-on experience building LLM-based systems in production.
Proven experience with agentic systems, including tool and function calling, multi-step and multi-agent orchestration, state and memory management, and API and enterprise-system integration.
A clear approach to evaluating and testing non-deterministic systems.
Strong understanding of retrieval and context engineering.
Strong Python skills and very good software engineering practices involving APIs, CI/CD, and containers.
Experience setting technical direction for others as a tech lead, staff engineer, or similar.
Awareness of data protection and regulatory requirements, including Swiss nDSG and the EU AI Act.
Excellent English language skills; German is a plus.

Flexible Work Smart concept with the option to work from home.
Welcoming, professional, collaborative culture with company events and team activities.
Strong team spirit, flat hierarchies, and varied responsibilities.
Modern workplace in central Zurich.
Generous training and development budget with dedicated learning time and additional fringe benefits.

201-500 employees