Lead AI Engineer, Agentic Shopping Platform

Vacaturebank; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Team diversity

Fresh lunch and snacks

Health insurance discount

Bike plan

Relocation support

Company ski trip

Job summary

Picnic is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to lead the agentic shopping initiative, owning technical direction and model-strategy decisions, and solving production challenges with safe, observable patterns.

You will balance latency, reliability, and cost while mentoring engineers and collaborating with product teams to deliver grounded shopping experiences in a fast-paced startup environment.

Relocation support and a comprehensive perk package are available for the right candidate.

Qualifications

• Proven track record of taking complex multi-turn conversational AI systems from architectural design to high-scale production.
• Experience training, fine-tuning, and optimizing open-weight LLMs for production deployment.
• Hands-on expertise building production RAG systems, context management, and state handling for multi-turn dialogues.
• Experience designing robust evaluation loops, continuous monitoring systems, and automated safety/guardrail mechanisms for customer-facing applications.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction, perform design reviews, and mentor engineering teams without relying on hierarchy.
• Strong Python skills and demonstrated ability to choose and productionize appropriate model, orchestration, retrieval, evaluation and inference tooling.

Responsibilities

• Take complex multi-turn AI systems from design to production.
• Train, fine-tune and optimize open-weight LLMs for deployment.
• Develop production RAG systems with context management and state handling.
• Establish evaluation loops, monitoring and safety guardrails for customer-facing apps.
• Collaborate with product and design to align on capabilities and user experience.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

LangGraph

vLLM

RAG

Open-weight LLMs

Qdrant

Pydantic AI

DeepEval

Mentoring

Education

Computer Science degree

PhD beneficial

Tools

Pydantic AI

DeepEval

Job description

Picnic is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to lead the agentic shopping initiative, owning technical direction and model-strategy decisions, and solving production challenges with safe, observable patterns.

You will balance latency, reliability, and cost while mentoring engineers and collaborating with product teams to deliver grounded shopping experiences in a fast-paced startup environment.

Relocation support and a comprehensive perk package are available for the right candidate.