Senior AI Platform Engineer

Frontiers Careers; Lausanne; Hybrid; CHF 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Extra wellbeing days

Volunteering days

Employee Assistance Programme

Learning & development support

Healthcare and pension benefits

Job summary

Frontiers seeks a senior engineer to design and build FrontiersOS, a full-stack platform integrating AI agents across editorial, research integrity, and publishing operations. You will own architecture, backend, frontend, model orchestration, and evaluation, pushing the boundaries of agentic work.

You will work across teams to enable self-service for editors and analysts, ensure reliability at scale, and drive responsible AI development with strong code review practices.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of engineering experience with production AI/LLM delivery.
• Strong system design and architecture skills with clean, well-structured code.
• Systems thinking about ripple effects across agents, workflows, permissions, and downstream consumers.
• Hands-on building with LLM APIs, agent frameworks, and AI coding tools.
• Experience with evaluation methodology for AI/agentic systems.
• Comfortable owning ambiguous, cross-cutting problems with strategic direction.
• Proficient cross-department communicator to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Curious AI-native builder with demonstrable work (e.g., GitHub repo, side project).
• Fast learner of unfamiliar business domains, including editorial/research workflows.
• Strong stakeholder management; translate trade-offs into business terms.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate FrontiersOS end to end — architecture, backend, frontend, model orchestration, evals, and surfaces (browser extension, native clients, embeddable widget, public API).
• Build for self-service enabling editors, analysts, and marketers to assemble agents, skills, automations, and apps with no engineering queue.
• Architect for reliability and scale across production workflows.
• Build the auditing and evaluation layer for agents and agentic systems.
• Use AI-assisted development as a default, while ensuring generated code gets proper review before shipping.
• Take full accountability for what you ship, including AI-generated components.

Skills

Engineering fundamentals

System design

AI fluency

LLM tooling

Evaluation methods

Ambiguity handling

Cross-functional communication

Stakeholder management

Business-oriented curiosity

Learning mindset

Job description

Who we are

At Frontiers, our purpose is simple yet ambitious: to make science open. We believe open science empowers the global scientific community to accelerate discovery and develop the solutions needed for healthy lives on a healthy planet.

We are one of the world’s largest and most influential open-access research publishers. Every article we publish is peer-reviewed and quality-certified, ensuring research is accessible to everyone, everywhere. To date, Frontiers research has been viewed over 4 billion times, demonstrating the real-world impact of science without barriers

Joining Frontiers means being part of a global, mission-driven organisation at the intersection of science, technology, and innovation — working alongside passionate colleagues who care deeply about advancing knowledge for the benefit of society.

To learn more about our impact and culture, please watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLJ7ZO3wOW4

About the Role:

FrontiersOS puts AI agents inside the systems Frontiers already runs — the Publishing Platform, the data warehouse, Salesforce, Microsoft 365 — and replaces none of them. The bet: AI should multiply what each person can do, not just add another tool to their day. Work already happens everywhere — an inbox, a review forum, a CRM tab, a warehouse query — so the agents live everywhere too, taking the repetitive half and leaving people the half only they can do: strategy, new markets, the relationships that move science.

The Innovation team designs, engineers, and runs FrontiersOS end to end, wired directly into real business problems across editorial, research integrity, and publishing operations. We're hiring a senior engineer with serious engineering depth and strong AI fluency — someone who can design and build the systems that make agentic work possible at Frontiers, not just consume an LLM API and call it done.

This is a full-stack platform role on a small team: you won't be handed a narrow backend slice and someone else's frontend — you'll move across the whole system as the problem demands.

What you’ll work with:

Multi-provider LLM routing, an agent tool-calling framework, retrieval-augmented generation and vector search, LLM evaluation and tracing, durable workflow orchestration, message queues, caching, ephemer... cloud sandboxes, container orchestration, a relational database, object storage, identity, and a cloud data warehouse — the real stack FrontiersOS runs on today, not a hypothetical one.

Key Responsabilities:

• Design, build, and operate FrontiersOS end to end — architecture, backend, frontend, model orchestration, evals, and the access surfaces (browser extension, native clients, embeddable widget, public API) people actually use it through, not just the agent/skill core.
• Build for self-service, not for engineers: editors, analysts, and marketers assemble their own agents, skills, automations, and apps with no engineering queue to wait in — your job is the paved paths, guardrails, and product judgment that make that safe and usable for people who don't write code.
• Architect for reliability and scale: this platform underpins critical production workflows across the company.
• Build the auditing and evaluation layer for agents and other agentic systems.
• Use AI-assisted development as a default part of your own workflow, while knowing precisely when generated code needs deep review before it ships.
• Take full accountability for what you ship, including work substantially generated by agents you built or are using.

Requirements

• 6+ years of engineering experience, including 1-2 years of proven production AI/LLM delivery.
• Strong engineering fundamentals: solid system design and architecture skills, writing code that's simple and well-structured, and sound software design principles. You're the one accountable for reviewing and standing behind what gets shipped.
• Systems thinking: you reason about how a change ripples across agents, workflows, permissions, and downstream consumers of the platform, not just the module you're editing.
• Strong, demonstrated AI fluency: hands‑on building with LLM APIs, agent frameworks, and AI coding tools — not familiarity, usage.
• Experience with evaluation methodology for AI/agentic systems — you can define and measure what “good” looks like.
• Comfortable owning ambiguous, cross-cutting problems with no fixed roadmap, with the senior-level judgment to set technical direction and push back on the wrong ask.
• A proficient cross-department communicator: able to explain a hard technical concept plainly to a non-technical audience, clearly enough to earn their buy‑in.
• A curious builder at heart, genuinely AI-native, reaching for it as a default way of working, with real proof of what you've built — a GitHub repo, a side project, or a portfolio.
• Fast learner of unfamiliar business domains: no publishing background required, but expected to become fluent enough in editorial and research‑integrity workflows to make sound platform calls.
• Strong stakeholder management: can be the platform's face to multiple business teams at once (Strategy, editorial, research integrity, and others), translating technical trade‑offs into terms stakeholders can act on and vague asks into scoped problems.
• Genuine curiosity about where the business needs leverage, not just where AI is technically interesting.

Nice to have:

• Prior experience building internal developer platforms
• Experience with closed-loop AI engineering and continuous feedback-driven improvement.

Benefits

• We prioritise office presence and emphasise in‑person collaboration, but also offer appropriate adjustments where needed, in line with company policy
• Extra wellbeing days on top of your annual leave allowance
• Up to 3 paid volunteering days each year
• 24/7 confidential Employee Assistance Programme (wellbeing, mental health, legal & financial support)
• Learning & development support via the Frontiers Learning Hub
• Competitive local benefits country dependent (e.g. healthcare and pension/retirement provision)

Frontiers actively embraces diversity and is a safe and welcoming workplace. Recruitment is free from discrimination – including based on race, national or ethnic origin, age, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation. With employees from more than 50 different nations, our diversity creates vibrant teams and constantly challenges us to appreciate multiple perspectives.