Release & Quality Lead

NestAI; Helsinki; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Occupational healthcare

Epassi Flex benefit

Lunch benefit

Regular team lunches and all-hands

Choice of Mac or PC

Holiday allowance

Phone benefit

Ongoing benefits expansion

Job summary

NestAI is an European AI lab for defence, building NestOS to provide an open, modular platform for sovereign European control. We seek a Release & Quality Lead who will own the release and validation strategy for parts of the platform, embedding quality as an engineering discipline alongside development teams.

You will define testing for agentic, non-deterministic systems and build pipelines that ship fast without breaking. This role requires a developer's mindset and cross-team collaboration.

Qualifications

• Solid hands-on software engineering experience.
• Experience with embedded/edge or fullstack/agent systems.
• Experience validating AI agent systems.
• Proficiency in Python and CI/CD tooling; Docker experience.

Responsibilities

• Own Release Engineering and CI/CD pipelines to enable rapid, reliable releases.
• Define validation for agentic, non-deterministic AI systems.
• Collaborate with engineers to bake quality in from the start.
• Understand the platform across agents, backend and infrastructure to assess release risk.

Skills

Software engineering

Validation & release engineering

CI/CD practices

Python

AI agent validation

Systems thinking

Embedded/edge experience

Team collaboration

Problem solving

Tools

Docker

CI/CD tooling

Build infrastructure tooling

ROS

Job description

Company

NestAI is a European AI lab for defence delivering the adaptive operating system for modern battlefield operations. We develop adaptive intelligence for unmanned and command systems: AI that continuously learns from operational data and adapts to changing conditions.

NestOS is our open, modular and interoperable platform that enables this at scale and keeps capability evolution under sovereign European control. Founded in 2025 by Peter Sarlin, whose previous company Silo AI became Europe's largest AI acquisition, NestAI brings together over 200 engineers and scientists and partners with leading European defence forces and industry.

Role Description

We are redefining what quality and validation mean for AI-native systems. As Release & Quality Lead, you will own the release and validation strategy for parts of our platform and forward deployed deliverables, not as a traditional QA function sitting outside development, but as an embedded engineering discipline that ships alongside the teams building the product.

You bring a developer's mindset to quality: you write code, you understand systems end-to-end, and you build the pipelines and validation practices that let us ship fast without shipping broken. In an organization where agentic, non-deterministic systems are becoming core to the product, you will help define what "tested" and "validated" even mean — there isn't a settled playbook here, and part of the job is writing it.

Day-to-Day Responsibilities:

• Own Release Engineering: Build and mature CI/CD pipelines that support rapid, reliable delivery cycles, with direct accountability for what goes into a release candidate and how it gets there.

• Define Validation for the AI-Agent Era: Develop testing and evaluation practices suited to agentic, non-deterministic systems — going beyond unit tests and static test plans to build evaluation frameworks that hold up when the system under test doesn't behave the same way twice.

• Sit inside the development team and collaborate hands-on with engineers to build quality from the start, rather than checking for it after the fact.

• Understand the platform in enough depth, across agents, backend, and infrastructure, to know where release risk actually lives, and build the CI/CD and monitoring safeguards that catch it early.

• Partner closely with the embedded/edge team and the fullstack/agent teams to make sure validation practice is coherent across the organization.

• Help define NestAI's validation strategy and practices as the organization scales, working closely with the FDE and R&D teams as the broader quality function takes shape.

Qualifications:

• Engineering Background: Solid hands-on software engineering experience — you can read, write, and reason about production code, not just test scripts written around it.

• Generalist Mindset: Hands-on validation and release engineering experience in either embedded/edge systems (e.g. hardware-in-the-loop testing, real-time constraints, ROS or similar) or fullstack/agent-based systems (e.g. owning CI/CD pipelines and release processes for complex systems), including responsibility for larger production shipments. You don’t need to master both, but having deep expertise with one and understanding of the other is crucial for the role.

• Systems Understanding: A genuine, detailed understanding of how the systems you validate actually work, not just how to operate a testing or automation tool on top of them.

• AI-Agent Validation Experience: Experience working with and validating AI agent systems, ideally from a modern AI company — you understand why testing non-deterministic, agentic systems is a fundamentally different problem from testing traditional software.

• Pragmatic Builder: A "get it done" attitude, comfortable with ambiguity and diving directly into problems and building solutions rather than waiting for a defined process to follow.

• Technical Stack: Proficiency in Python and practical experience with modern CI/CD and build infrastructure tooling, plus containerization (Docker) for build automation and image management.

• Bonus: Experience across both agent and fullstack development is a strong plus, as is prior experience building or scaling a quality/validation function inside a newly formed or fast-changing organization.

Why join NestAI

At NestAI, you’ll build meaningful, real-world technology as part of a world-class team of engineers, scientists, and experienced professionals. You’ll work on systems where reliability genuinely matters, contribute to Europe’s security and resilience, and solve problems that demand depth, trust, and craftsmanship.

If you want to build with purpose - and with leading experts in the field - you’ve come to the right place.

What we offer

We offer a growing set of practical benefits to support your work and wellbeing, day to day:

• Occupational healthcare (currently provided by Mehiläinen)

• Epassi Flex benefit (sports, culture, commuting, wellbeing)

• Lunch benefit (25% tax-free coverage)

• Regular team lunches and all-hands events

• Your choice of Mac or PC

• Holiday allowance (50% of holiday salary)

• Phone benefit according to company policy (subscription and device)

• We are continuously developing and expanding our benefits as we grow.

Practicalities

Employment is subject to applicable security screening (including SUPO, where required).

NestAI is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all applicants based on their skills, experience, and potential.

Please note that we We are currently unable to provide visa sponsorship or international relocation support for this position. Candidates must already be based in Finland or in the EU and have a valid work permit for this region at the time of application.