Lead Product Engineer - AI

Vicoland; Leipzig; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly

ESOP

Flexible hours

Excellent compensation

Job summary

Vicoland seeks a Lead Product Engineer - AI to lead an engineering team and own the technical direction across the stack. You will stay hands-on while guiding architecture and AI-driven delivery, aligning with Business Development and Product stakeholders.

Strong English and German, plus a track record of shipping AI-enabled systems, are essential. Located in Europe, with offices in multiple cities, the role offers remote-friendly work hours and ESOP participation as part of an excellent

Qualifications

• Led an engineering team (ideally 3+ engineers) with hiring, evaluations and coaching.
• Hands-on coding ability while delivering production-grade software.
• Experience across stack (frontend, backend, data, infra) and AI components (LLMs, embeddings, RAG).
• Strong product sense: owned a feature end-to-end, from user talks to measured impact.
• Experience developing AI agents and integrating them into business workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead, grow and enable a team of engineers; hire and strengthen the team.
• Be the main engineering lead; potential path to CTO.
• Own architectural direction; set scalable, robust architecture from frontend to infra.
• Stay hands-on; build features end-to-end using AI to ship high-quality software.
• Translate business needs into technical roadmaps with stakeholders.
• Ensure team can work end-to-end with clear standards and gates.
• Improve AI-driven development: context engineering, model selection, evaluation, observability.
• Lead architectural discussions, code reviews and retrospectives; foster ownership.
• Advise executives on tech strategy, build-vs-buy decisions, team setup.

Skills

People leadership

Hands-on coding

AI systems

Product sense

AI agents integration

Context engineering

Code reviews

Team collaboration

English proficiency

German proficiency

Distributed teams

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Job description

Vicoland gives the professional services market a new dimension: Virtual Companies – \"Vicos\". We invented Vicos as a new type of supplier, more efficient than traditional professional services firms (consultancies, system integrators, agencies etc.). We have received 20 million € in round A financing.

Vicos may consist of freelancers, SMEs and AI agents. They organize through our AI-driven SaaS platform to act like real companies, competing successfully for large enterprise projects, e g. ERP introductions or AI transformations. Vicos have proven to be more cost-efficient and to deliver better quality than traditional companies.

Already, 120+ Vicos with thousands of freelancers work on projects for enterprise clients like BASF, Miele, Siemens or Daimler and many SME. Forbes and Forrester have named Vicoland as a leading force transforming the market.

Our certified platform is key to our success. It provides the full digital infrastructure which makes Vicos come true as a new form to organize human labor and human-agentic interaction. It covers end-to-end all essential areas: marketing, finance, legal, and organization.

Given its ambitious and transformative purpose, our platform is highly complex (though easy use). Developing it further takes engineers who combine technical excellence, pragmatic judgement and entrepreneurial spirit. The Lead Product Engineer - AI we are looking for embodies these qualities in their leadership. They are up for making a major contribution to our company and to our society.

Tasks

• You will lead, grow and enable a team of (forward deployed) engineers: make every engineer successful in their role and hire new ones who strengthen the team.

• You will be the only (and main) lead for the engineering team, with career option to progress to CTO

• Own the technical direction and technology decisions for Vicoland. Set the architecture across the stack, from frontend to infrastructure, and make sure what we build is scalable, robust and maintainable.

• Stay hands-on: contribute features yourself end-2-end by understanding business needs, coding, building prototypes, and for all that using AI to aggressively ship high-quality software alongside your team.

• Translate business needs into technical roadmaps in close cooperation with Business Development, Product and other stakeholders. Prioritize, scope and make trade-offs explicit.

• Ensure each team member can work end-to-end: concept & design, development, QA, deployment and production monitoring, with clear engineering standards and quality gates.

• Continuously improve how we build with AI: best practices for context engineering, model selection, evaluation, tracing and observability, so that quality is measured, not assumed.

• Run architectural discussions, code reviews and retrospectives; create a culture of ownership, constructive challenge and continuous learning.

• Act as a sparring partner to the Chief Product Officer and the business leadership team on technology strategy, build-vs-buy decisions and team setup.

Requirements

• Have proven people leadership experience: you have led an engineering team (ideally 3+ engineers), including hiring, performance evaluations, career development and coaching.

• Have excelled somewhere through an impactful technical contribution, one which we can talk about, and still enjoy writing code yourself.

• Have deep hands-on experience across the stack (frontend, backend, data, infrastructure/cloud) and a track record of architecting and shipping production-grade software, preferably with AI components (LLMs, embeddings, RAG pipelines, autonomous agents, PyTorch/TensorFlow).

• Strong product sense: You’ve owned a feature or product area end-to-end: talked to users, decided what to build, designed it, and measured whether it worked

• Have experience developing AI agents and integrating them into business workflows.

• Be on top of the latest tools, models and trends in AI-assisted software engineering. You are excellent at context engineering (incl. prompting), know when to leverage which model, and have first‑hand experience with Claude Code or Cursor, and you know how to roll these practices out across a team.

• Know how to evaluate what gets built. You can design eval sets, work with LLM-as-judge or ground‑truth data, use tracing and observability tooling to find and fix regressions, and make evaluation a team habit.

• Balance autonomy and alignment: you drive your team from idea to finished product independently, while knowing when to involve, align with or escalation to others.

• Have the ability to thoughtfully challenge ideas and drive constructive discussions with users, engineers, product, and business leadership.

• Lead with humility: you create psychological safety, give and receive honest feedback, and measure your success by the success of your team.

• Reside within ±3 hours of Central European Time (to enable effective collaboration), at best in one of our office locations in Barcelona, Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Sevilla.

• Full professional proficiency in English at C2 level.

• Full professional proficiency in German at C1 level.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience building or scaling an engineering team in a startup or scale‑up environment.

• Prior experience integrating AI into SaaS business workflows, ideally in a client‑facing or forward‑deployed setup.

• Familiarity with the modern AI‑tooling ecosystem (agents, memory systems, vector databases, orchestration frameworks).

• Experience working with distributed or multi‑location teams.

Benefits

• You’ll work in an international, closely knit team of high‑performers and entrepreneurial spirits.

• Remote‑friendly + flexible work hours.

• Excellent compensation + participation in the company through our ESOP.

• Growth mindset: Hard skills are important — but mindset matters more. If you meet most of the requirements and you’re hungry to learn, apply anyway.