Lead AI Software Architect/Engineer (m/f/d)

Simon-Kucher & Partners; Köln; Vor Ort; EUR 85.000 - 120.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

A leading global consultancy is seeking a Lead AI Software Architect/Engineer to design and build scalable SaaS products within their AI Lab in Cologne. This role involves combining technical expertise with strategic vision to develop AI-powered solutions that transform client business models. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in SaaS architectures, proven leadership experience, and excellent communication skills. Join a dynamic team dedicated to innovation within a startup atmosphere, offering numerous professional growth opportunities.

Leistungen

Hybrid working

Corporate discounts

Wellbeing support

Extensive training programs

Employee events

Qualifikationen

• Proven experience in designing and operating SaaS products used by real users.
• Ownership of SaaS products beyond initial launch, maintaining and evolving them.
• Strong leadership skills in managing teams through complex projects.

Aufgaben

• Design scalable SaaS architectures for AI products.
• Evaluate and integrate third‑party libraries.
• Mentor junior team members and provide architectural oversight.

Kenntnisse

SaaS product development

AI frameworks

Cloud platforms (AWS)

Communication skills

Distributed systems

Tools

Python

Hugging Face Transformers

LangChain

PyTorch

Jobbeschreibung

Lead AI Software Architect/Engineer (m/f/d)

We are seekingan experienced Lead AI Architect/ Engineer to contribute to designing and building scalable SaaSproducts within our AI Lab. In this role, you’ll combine deep technicalexpertise with strategic vision to build AI-powered products that will helptransform our clients’ business models and enable their growth.

Simon-Kucheris at the forefront of innovation in driving commercial excellence, revampingbusiness models, developing solutions and methodologies for unlocking bettergrowth of our clients. Within AI Lab, we are developing cutting‑edge large scale AI products to deliver sustained top‑line impact for our clients.

Are you interested in working in a team of AI evangelists with a can‑doattitude? Want to experience the dynamics of agile processes in open-mindedteams? How about getting creative in a startup atmosphere with a steepdevelopment curve and flat hierarchies? And most importantly, do you want tomake a difference? Then you've come to the right place.

What makes us special:

• Advance your career with exciting professional opportunities in our thriving company with a startup feel
• Innovate by transforming ideas into cutting‑edge AI products, championing AI and Generative AI through creative experimentation to push boundaries and deliver transformative solutions.
• Voice your unique ideas in a culture defined by our entrepreneurial spirit, openness, and integrity
• Feel at home working with our helpful, enthusiastic colleagues who have great team spirit
• Broaden your perspective with our extensive training curriculum and learning programs (e.g. LinkedIn Learning)
• Speak your mind in our holistic feedback and development processes (e.g. 360‑degree feedback)
• Satisfy your need for adventure with our opportunities to live and work abroad in one of our many international offices
• Enjoy our benefits, such as hybrid working, daycare allowance, corporate discounts, and wellbeing support (e.g. Headspace)
• Unwind in our break areas where you can help yourself to the healthy snacks and beverages provided
• See another side of your coworkers at our frequent employee events, World Meetings and Holiday Parties

How you will create an impact:

• Design scalable SaaS architectures for AI/GenAI products.
• Evaluate, select, and integrate third‑party libraries and open‑source frameworks.
• Set up databases and LLM frameworks
• Work with cloud platform (AWS)to deploy and manage services securely.x
• Design and lead development of AI products for business‑specific use cases that will be offered to our clients as SaaS
• Mentor and guide junior team members, setting clear technical directions and providing architectural oversight.
• Lead development of RAG and/or fine‑tuning for LLMs and data pipelines for internal and external data sources (e.g., pricing databases, market benchmarks, CRM exports).
• Set engineering standards and code quality guidelines
• Work with MLOps engineers to deploy and maintain models.
• Optimize performance, latency, and cost of AI/GenAI solutions.
• Working closely with leadership, engineeringproduct team and business stakeholders, helping to translate strategy intotechnical direction.x
• Rapidly prototype new ideas and iterate based on user feedback (consultants or clients).
• Lead technical PoCs and MVP development and evaluate build‑vs‑buy decisions for GenAI components.
• Stay ahead of AI/GenAIdevelopments and assess new models/tools for adoption.

About you:

• Proven experience with designing, developing and operating customer‑facing SaaS products used by real users at scale
• You owned SaaS products beyond initial launch, maintaining, evolving and operating them over time
• You are business‑oriented data-centric, passionate about building products that deliver tangible value to our clients
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences.
• Very strong communication and collaboration skills - supporting other engineers, async collaboration, explaining technical decisions to non-technical audiences, writing documentation, showing initiative.
• High standards around reliability, security and long‑term maintainability
• Proven leadership in managing teams through complex infrastructure and data‑centric projects, encouraging collaboration and innovation.
• Proven experience indesigning and building applications using GenAI models, including open‑source and commercialLLMs (code and general‑purpose), including deployment/integration experience.

Technical skills

• SaaS multi‑tenant architectures
• Strong requirement for distributed systems and production API design (latency, caching, backpressure, resiliency patterns).
• Experience designing event‑driven architectures and data pipelines (Kafka/Kinesis) if your products need ingestion + near real‑time refresh.
• Working experience with cloud platforms; deep expertise in AWS
• Strong Python skills and experience with AI frameworks like Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, and PyTorch.
• Beyond “RAG/fine‑tuning”: require experience with RAG architecture patterns (chunking, hybrid search, reranking, citations, source attribution); Evaluation frameworks (e.g., automated retrieval eval, hallucination checks, regression testing); Safety/guardrails (prompt injection defenses, content filtering, PII redaction)
• Experience with high‑performance inference (vLLM/TensorRT‑LLM where applicable), batching, quantization, and GPU cost/perf tradeoffs.
• Designing multi‑model routing and cost controls (fallbacks, caching, budget ceilings).
• Require competence in: data modeling, data quality checks, schema evolution, and governance.
• Vector DB + embedding ops: index management, re‑embedding strategies, retrieval tuning.
• CI/CD for ML, model registry, feature stores, monitoring (drift + performance).
• Ability to define engineering standards (linting, type checking, testing strategy, code review norms) and enforce via CI.
• Threat modeling for GenAI (prompt injection, data exfiltration), privacy‑by‑design, retention policies, and auditability.

Have we sparked your interest? Simply click the 'Apply now' button to submit your application. Please note that, for data protection reasons, we cannot accept applications via email.
Would you like to learn more about us and our company culture? Click here to watch our recruitment video.

About Simon-Kucher
Simon-Kucher is a global consultancy with more than 2,000 employees in 30+ countries.
Our sole focus is on unlocking better growth that drives measurable revenue and profit for our clients. We achieve this by optimizing every lever of their commercial strategy – product, price, innovation, marketing, and sales – based on deep insights into what customers want and value. With 40 years of experience in monetization topics of all kinds, we are regarded as the world’s leading pricing and growth specialist. simon-kucher.com

We believe in building a culture that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion, creating an environment in which our people feel valued, are able to be themselves and feel their contribution matters. If we get that right, remarkable things will happen; people will grow faster, innovate, feel valued, and create better outcomes for everyone – our people, our clients and, of course, our business.
Your personal contact:
Maria Weininger
recruitment.germany(at)simon-kucher.com

Please submit your application exclusively via the “Apply now” button!

Better growth starts here. With you.

Lead AI Software ArchitectEngineer mfd • Cologne, DE