Tech Lead - AI & Innovation

Vicoland; Frankfurt; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Vicoland is seeking a Tech Lead: AI & Innovation to guide a team of engineers and own the architectural direction of our AI-driven platform. You will combine hands-on coding with strategic oversight to ship robust software, enabled by state-of-the-art AI components and cross-team collaboration.

You will work across frontend, backend and AI infrastructure, align with Business Development, Product and leadership, and drive a culture of rapid experimentation and high-quality delivery in a hybrid,

Qualifications

• Led an engineering team and hired engineers.
• Contributed technically with production-grade software.
• Experience across stack and AI components.
• Experience developing AI agents.
• Familiar with context engineering and prompting.
• Able to evaluate features with monitoring and observability.
• Agile methodologies and ownership.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of engineers.
• Be the main tech lead and set architecture.
• Own technical direction end-to-end.
• Code and ship features hands-on with AI.
• Translate business needs into technical roadmaps.
• Ensure end-to-end product traceability and quality gates.
• Run architectural discussions and code reviews.
• Partner with CPO and leadership on strategy.

Skills

People leadership

Hands-on coding

AI/ML experience

System architecture

Frontend/backend/full stack

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

PyTorch

TensorFlow

RAG pipelines

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 Tech Lead: AI & Innovation we are looking for embodies these qualities in his or her leadership. He or she is 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) tech lead for the engineering team, with carreer 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.
• Makre sure 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).
• 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.
• Practice a truly agnostic approach to stack and tools: you pick the right tech for the problem, not vice versa, and can explain your choices to both engineers and business stakeholders.
• Balance autonomy and alignment: you drive your team from idea to finished product independently, while knowing when to involve, align with or elevate 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.
• 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.