Tech Lead - AI & Innovation

Join; Leipzig; Hybrid; EUR 110.000 - 140.000; Vollzeit

Benefits dieser Stelle

Remote-friendly

ESOP participation

Excellent compensation

Zusammenfassung

Vicoland is seeking a Tech Lead: AI & Innovation to guide a team of engineers and shape the technical direction of the Vicos platform. You will own architecture from frontend to infrastructure, ensuring scalable, robust, and maintainable software with AI components.

You will stay hands-on, shipping features end-to-end while aligning with business needs. The role involves collaborating with Business Development, Product, and leadership to plan roadmaps and drive high-quality outcomes.

Qualifikationen

• Led engineering teams and mentored engineers to success.
• Delivered production-grade software with AI components and a hands-on coding approach.
• Shaped technical roadmaps in collaboration with product/business stakeholders.

Aufgaben

• Lead, grow and enable a team of (forward deployed) engineers; hire new members to strengthen the team.
• Serve as the main tech lead for the engineering team; option to progress to CTO.
• Own technical direction and architecture across stack; ensure scalability and maintainability.
• Stay hands-on: contribute features end-to-end and ship high-quality software with AI.
• Translate business needs into technical roadmaps with stakeholders.
• Ensure end-to-end ownership: concept, design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring.
• Drive AI best practices: context engineering, model selection, evaluation, tracing, observability.
• Run architecture reviews, code reviews, and retrospectives; foster ownership culture.
• Advise CPO and leadership on technology strategy and make build-vs-buy decisions.

Kenntnisse

People leadership

Full-stack development

AI integration

Context engineering

Model evaluation

Architecture & design

Claude Code / Cursor

Discuss with stakeholders

Autonomy & alignment

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Jobbeschreibung

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.

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.