Senior AI Platform Engineer

Frontiers Media SA; Lausanne; Hybrid; CHF 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Extra wellbeing days

Up to 3 paid volunteering days peryear

24/7 confidential Employee Assistance

Learning & development support via the

Competitive local benefits (healthcare

Job summary

Frontiers in Lausanne, Switzerland, is seeking a senior engineer to join FrontiersOS, the AI-powered expansion of our publishing and data platform. You will work across backend, frontend, model orchestration, and governance, shaping architecture and driving reliability.

You’ll combine deep engineering depth with solid AI fluency to build scalable systems, mentor teammates, and enable business users with self-service agents and workflows in a fast-paced, mission-driven environment.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience across backend and infrastructure.
• Strong fundamentals in system design and scalable architectures.
• Hands-on AI fluency and experience with AI coding agents.
• Ability to reason about cross‑team impact and downstream effects.
• Excellent cross‑functional communication to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Proven ability to lead code and design reviews.
• Comfort with ambiguous, cross‑cutting problems and strategic decisions.
• Curious builder with a track record of practical AI‑driven solutions.

Responsibilities

• Own major areas of FrontiersOS end to end: set architecture and roadmap, and operate across backend, frontend, model orchestration, evals and surfaces.
• Architect for reliability and scale: define SLOs, build observability, participate in incident response.
• Build in security and governance from day one: permissions, data access boundaries, audit trails.
• Raise the quality bar: lead code/design reviews, write design docs, set patterns.
• Build for self-service: enable business users to create agents, skills, automations, apps.
• Use AI-assisted development as default, know when to review generated code.
• Take full accountability for what you ship, including agent-generated work.
• Be the senior engineer inside the team: mentor teammates and share knowledge.

Skills

10+ years engineering experience

Backend & infrastructure fundamentals

AI fluency / AI coding agents

Systems thinking

Cross-functional communication

Mentoring / leadership

Fast learner

Data-driven decision making

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.

We're hiring a senior engineer with serious engineering depth, strong backend and infrastructure fundamentals, and solid AI fluency to help build and run FrontiersOS end to end. This is a full-stack platform role on a small team where 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, with the experience and judgment expected of a senior engineer.

What you'll work with:

Relational databases, object storage, message queues, caching, durable workflow orchestration, container orchestration, ephemera cloud sandboxes, identity, and a cloud data warehouse, plus multi-provider LLM routing, an agent tool‑calling framework, RAG and vector search, and LLM evaluation and tracing - the real stack FrontiersOS runs on today, not a hypothetical one.

Key Responsabilities:

• Own major areas of FrontiersOS end to end: set their architecture and technical roadmap, then build and operate them across backend, frontend, model orchestration, evals and the access surfaces (browser extension, native clients, embeddable widget, public API)
• Architect for reliability and scale: define SLOs, build observability, and take part in incident response for a platform the company depends on
• Build in security and governance from day one: permissions, credential handling, data access boundaries, audit trails and safe defaults for user‑built agents
• Raise the quality bar: lead code and design reviews, write clear design docs, set patterns others follow, and help teammates grow
• Build for self‑service, not for engineers: enable business users to create their own agents, skills, automations, and apps
• 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
• Be the senior engineer inside the team: raise the quality bar through code and design reviews, and share what you know with teammates

• 10+ years of engineering experience
• Strong engineering fundamentals, including backend and infrastructure: solid system design skills, writing code that’s simple and well‑structured, following sound software design principles
• 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
• Works with AI every day: AI coding agents are part of how you plan, build and debug, and you have the judgement to know when their output needs a closer look.
• Comfortable owning ambiguous, cross‑cutting problems with no fixed roadmap, with the senior‑level judgement to contribute to technical decisions 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, whether that’s a GitHub repo, a side project, or a portfolio
• Fast learner of unfamiliar business domains: no publishing background required, but expected to become fluent
• 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

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