Freelance AI Engineer

MindWave; Brussel Hoofdstad; Hybrid; EUR 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Meal vouchers

Annual training budget

Remote work support

Freelancer rate transparency

Job summary

MindWave is seeking a Medior AI Engineer to own the Run phase of production AI services in Brussels. You will keep retrieval assistants and AI agents reliable, secure, and cost-efficient in production, collaborating with the AI Platform Architect, Senior Engineers, business owners, and IT operations.

You will monitor service health, manage ingestion pipelines, and supervise model upgrades and cost governance while ensuring GDPR compliance.

Qualifications

• Proven experience operating production AI/LLM apps and data pipelines.
• Strong Python development skills with hands-on LangChain or similar frameworks.
• Solid Azure AI services knowledge (Foundry/OpenAI models, embeddings, Azure Search).

Responsibilities

• Monitor production AI services: availability, latency, errors; handle incidents and requests.
• Maintain evaluation sets and track answer quality, feedback, and regressions.
• Manage ingestion pipelines, refreshes, document issues, onboard new content sources.

Skills

Python

LangChain

Azure AI

AKS / Kubernetes

MLflow / Databricks

OpenTelemetry

Terraform

Helm

Azure DevOps

English communication

Dutch/French

Tools

Terraform

Helm

Azure DevOps

Job description

At MindWave, we’re building a new way of working with an international community of experts in an innovative, people-first environment.

We are looking for a Medior AI Engineer to join their AI Center of Excellence and own the Run phase of their production AI services. Following handover from the Build team, you will keep their employee- and customer-facing retrieval assistants and AI agents reliable, measured, secure, and cost-efficient in production—collaborating closely with the AI Platform Architect, Senior Build Engineers, business owners, and IT operations.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Production Operations: Monitor service availability, latency, and error rates; handle incidents and service requests, conduct root cause analyses, and resolve or elevate issues.
• Answer Quality & Evaluation: Run and maintain evaluation sets (golden sets) alongside business content owners; track answer quality, non-answer rates, and user feedback to detect and investigate quality regressions.
• Ingestion Pipelines: Manage incremental refreshes, troubleshoot failed documents, monitor index health, and onboard new content sources or business domains within existing connectors.
• Agent Integrations: Monitor tool and integration calls to business systems, resolve failures and timeouts, and audit action logs and exceptions for agents acting on users' behalf.
• Safe Change Management: Execute model version upgrades and retirements, prompt/configuration updates, and security/dependency patches—validating every change against evaluation sets before release.
• FinOps & Cost Monitoring: Track token consumption and operational costs per service, set up drift alerts, and propose cost-optimization measures.
• Infrastructure & Environments: Maintain Terraform, Helm, and Azure DevOps artifacts while ensuring consistency across DEV, TST, ACC, and PROD environments.
• Data Protection & Governance: Enforce trace retention, erasure, and access restriction policies in line with each service’s Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA).
• Documentation & Reporting: Maintain up-to-date runbooks and technical documentation, and provide regular service health reports to service owners and the AI CoE.
• Continuous Improvement: Deliver minor enhancements and bug fixes in production (while structural changes and major new features remain with the Build team).

Your Profile & Technical Environment:

• Proven experience operating, maintaining, or engineering production AI/LLM applications and data ingestion pipelines.
• Strong Python development skills and hands-on experience with LangChain (or similar agent orchestration frameworks).
• Solid experience with Azure AI & Cloud services, specifically Microsoft Foundry (OpenAI models & embeddings), Azure AI Search, Azure API Management, Azure AI Content Safety, and AKS (Kubernetes).
• Experience with AI evaluation, observability, and tracing tools, ideally MLflow on Databricks and OpenTelemetry.
• Hands-on proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD pipelines using Terraform, Helm, and Azure DevOps.
• Pragmatic, structured mindset with strong troubleshooting skills, attention to security/GDPR compliance, and the ability to collaborate smoothly across technical and business stakeholders.
• Good communication skills in English, alongside Dutch and/or French. Soft Skills and the MindWave Mindset
• At MindWave, we value people who are not only strong in what they do, but also in how they work with others.
• You take ownership and feel comfortable working with a high level of autonomy. You don’t wait for perfect instructions before moving forward: you explore, challenge assumptions and turn ideas into working solutions.
• You combine thoroughness with pragmatism and communicate openly when you see opportunities, risks or better ways of doing things. You enjoy collaborating across disciplines and can explain complex technical ideas clearly.
• Curiosity is part of how you work. You’re interested in the possibilities of AI and new technologies, eager to experiment and happy to share what you learn with the wider community.
• Above all, you value transparency, trust and human connection. Because at MindWave, we believe the best results come from strong experts who are given the freedom and support to do meaningful work.

Working model:

• Hybrid role in Brussels.

What We Offer

• A growing international community of experts, with both spontaneous and planned knowledge sharing moments such as brown bag sessions (innovation and tech key notes)
• A strong and accessible leadership team that stays closely connected to consultants and projects
• A modern consultancy approach focused on trust, autonomy & flexibility in how you work
• A transparent and people-first culture where you can grow, take ownership and be yourself.
• Long-term, impactful projects with complex international environments and meaningful transformation challenges.
• Competitive payroll package including medical insurance, meal vouchers, annual training budget and remote work support.
• For freelancers: full transparency on rates and fees, no surprises, just fairness.