Senior AI Platform Engineer

Frontiers Media, LLC; Lausanne; On-site; CHF 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Wellbeing days

Volunteering days

Employee Assistance Programme

Frontiers Learning Hub

Competitive local benefits

Job summary

FrontiersOS is hiring a senior engineer with deep backend and infrastructure expertise to build and run the FrontiersOS platform end-to-end. You will work across the stack, owning architecture, reliability, security, and performance in a fast-paced team.

You’ll collaborate with data, product, and editorial teams, apply AI-native workflows, and mentor others. The role requires 10+ years of engineering experience, strong design skills, and the judgment to ship high‑quality software.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience.
• Strong backend and infrastructure fundamentals.
• Systems thinking across agents, workflows, and permissions.
• AI-native mindset with hands-on AI coding experience.

Responsibilities

• Own major areas of FrontiersOS end to end: architecture, roadmap, and operation across backend, frontend, model orchestration, and surfaces.
• Architect for reliability and scale: define SLOs, observability, incident response.
• Build with security and governance from day one: permissions, data access boundaries, audit trails.
• Raise the quality bar: lead reviews, write design docs, set patterns for others.
• Enable self-service for business users to create agents, skills, and apps.
• Apply AI-assisted development as a default, with judgment for when to review generated code.
• Take full accountability for shipped work, including agent-generated outputs.
• Be the senior engineer inside the team and mentor teammates.

Skills

Backend engineering

System design

AI fluency

Cloud platforms

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

LLM routing framework

Agent tool-calling framework

Observability tooling

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, ephemer 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.