AI Platform Engineer

picnic.app; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Teamwork culture

Impactful work

Fresh lunches and snacks

CZ health insurance discount

Bike rental program

Relocation support (moving costs)

25 holidays and pension plan

Equipment: phone + laptop

Job summary

Picnic is building a new generation of intelligent shopping experiences and fulfillment automation with AI. As an AI Platform Engineer in Amsterdam, you’ll design tools and infrastructure to move AI from experiments to dependable production systems, including model access, tracing, evaluation, fine-tuning and low-latency serving.

You’ll define the technical direction for AI-enabled engineering, collaborating with product teams across search, personalization, and fulfillment automation to deliver

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, AI or a related field
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals, especially in Python
• Proven track record building self-service AI platforms and scaling their adoption
• Experience bringing language models or other ML/AI systems into production with reliability, latency, security, and cost considerations
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD and observability
• Able to own end-to-end projects and collaborate across platform, ML/AI and product teams
• Experience with LLM gateways, tool protocols like MCP, guardrails, or policy-aware model access
• Experience with LLM fine-tuning and serving

Responsibilities

• Evolve our AI Gateway with provider integrations, model routing, fallbacks, rate limits, privacy controls, and cost attribution.
• Build end-to-end tracing, evaluation, and production monitoring across prompts, models, retrieval, tools, and agent state.
• Productionize open-weight models with fine-tuning, evaluation, and real-time inference for high throughput workloads.
• Provide APIs, SDKs, templates and local tooling for structured generation, tool use, model experiments and agent workflows.
• Collaborate with product teams across search, personalization, and fulfillment automation to steer AI platform direction

Skills

Python

Backend engineering

LLM experience

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field

Tools

FastAPI

Kubernetes

Docker

OpenAI

Snowflake

PostgreSQL

OpenSearch

RabbitMQ

Kafka

Terraform

Vault

Datadog

Job description

Picnic is building a new generation of intelligent shopping experiences and fulfillment automation with AI. In our app, we help customers search in their own words, plan meals around their household and shop effortlessly. In our supply chain, automation helps us deliver efficiently and sustainably.

As an AI Platform Engineer, you’ll build the tools and infrastructure to take AI from experiment to dependable production system: model access, tracing, evaluation, fine-tuning and low-latency serving. You'll set the technical direction for how engineers build with AI, working closely with product teams across search, personalisation, and fulfillment automation.

Tricks of the trade

Provide an environment in which agents run at optimal cost: Evolve our AI Gateway with provider integrations, model routing, fallbacks, rate limits, privacy controls, and cost attribution.

Standardise LLM tracing, evals and benchmarking: Build end-to-end tracing, evaluation, and production monitoring across prompts, models, retrieval, tools, and agent state. Help teams turn human judgement and customer outcomes into repeatable evaluation sets.

Productionize open-weight models: Create the path to fine-tune, evaluate and serve open-weight models. Support real-time inference and high-throughput batch workloads, and make latency, performance and cost trade-offs visible.

Build a paved path for getting agents to run in production: Enable developers by providing clear APIs, SDKs, templates and local tooling for structured generation, tool use, model experiments and agent workflows. Make the supported path easier than assembling one-off infrastructure.

Our Tech: You’ll work with Python on a daily basis, using frameworks like FastAPI, LiteLLM, OpenAI, Gemini and more. Supporting this core stack are Snowflake, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Helm, Terraform, Vault, and Datadog. Our open-weight training and serving stack is one of the choices you'll help us make.

Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, AI or a related field

Strong backend engineering fundamentals, especially in Python

Proven track record building self-service AI platforms and scaling their adoption

Experience bringing language models or other ML/AI systems into production with meaningful reliability, latency, security, and cost requirements

Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD and observability

Able to take end-to-end ownership, make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions and work effectively across platform, ML/AI and product teams

Experience with LLM or agent gateways, tool protocols such as MCP, guardrails or policy-aware model access

Experience with LLM fine-tuning and serving

Picnic Perks

Teamwork makes the dream work

With more than 80 nationalities across 3 countries, you’ll be part of a diverse company with plenty of cool stuff to get involved with, from board game evenings to after-work drinks to our company ski trip and more!

Make a difference

You’ll work in an awesome startup environment with the freedom to drive your own projects and create a visible impact. Our fully electric vehicles and sustainable business model mean you’ll also be contributing to making the world a better place!

Fresh Lunch, coffee, and snacks

Our offices are equipped with fully-fledged coffee bars and a kitchen and chefs. They prepare delicious fresh and warm lunches every day so you can keep your energy up.

We have a partnership with CZ (a health insurance provider). Picnic employees get a discount on CZ insurance packages between 5% and 15%. Furthermore, through our partnership with Lease a Bike, you can rent-to-own a new (e)bike at a discounted rate

If you’re moving from another country to join Picnic we make it as smooth as possible for you. We’ll cover your flight costs for you and your partner and kids, your first month's rent and moving costs (up to €2000), and help you with the 30% tax ruling setup and application.

All the rest

At Picnic you get 25 holidays, we cover your travel expenses and offer a pension plan. And your phone and laptop are on us, as well.

A bit about us

When you join Picnic, you’re joining the shopping revolution, delivering groceries to millions of people across Europe, and we’re growing fast. Think super fresh products and personal service, but in a modern, sustainable way. The tech team at Picnic is at the core of Picnic. From deep learning models to forecast orders to delivery algorithms to warehouse logistics: we’ve built it all from the ground up. You’ll thrive here if you’re a problem solver with a pro-active mindset who’s not afraid to be challenged daily.

Recruitment Process

1. CV screening
2. Phone screening
3. Interviews
4. Assessment day
5. Offer

Commitment to equal opportunities

Picnic is an equal opportunity employer—this means that all decisions regarding applications will be based on qualifications and merit. Applicants will be regarded independently of age, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, skin color, civil status, religious beliefs, physical or mental disability, or any other factors protected by law.
At Picnic, we celebrate and value our differences and are committed to building a safe and inclusive working environment where everyone can be themselves.

Our Mentality

At Picnic, we build from scratch with an owner’s mindset. We dive into the unknown, taking end-to-end responsibility for every outcome, going the extra mile to tackle complex challenges. We turn insights into action, working as a team to get things done. We move fast, never compromising on quality or long-term impact. With grit and commitment we build what has never been built before!