Staff AI Engineer - Agentic Shopping

teampicnic; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Team diversity

Impactful work

Lunch & snacks

Health insurance discount

Bike plan

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Picnic is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to lead the technical direction for Agentic Shopping, architecting multi-turn conversational agents and productionizing RAG-based workflows. You will align with product and design to balance latency, safety, and cost while mentoring engineers across the organization.

The role emphasizes hands-on leadership, open-weight model optimization, and robust evaluation and monitoring in a fast-paced startup environment in Amsterdam.

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.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction for agentic shopping experiences.
• Architect multi-turn conversational AI systems for production.
• Mentor engineers and drive production readiness.
• Design and implement open-weight LLM strategies (fine-tuning, distillation, RAG).
• Establish evaluation loops and safety guardrails.
• Coordinate with product and design teams on trade-offs.

Skills

AI system design

Open-weight LLMs

RAG systems

Evaluation & monitoring

Leadership without hierarchy

Python & ML tooling

Education

CS/AI degree (PhD a plus)

Tools

PyTorch

LangGraph

vLLM

Pydantic AI

Qdrant

DeepEval

Job description

In a nutshell

Build the intelligence that helps households get the week sorted. Agentic grocery assistance: Picnic brings together something unusually powerful for an AI builder: a direct customer relationship, a live grocery assortment and the operational system that takes every order from intention to delivery. That gives you the opportunity to build an assistant that does more than talk; it can understand a household's plans and constraints, assemble a grounded basket, explain its choices and learn from what customers accept or change. You will decide where models, retrieval, ranking and deterministic services add real value, balancing customer control, correctness, latency, reliability and cost.

Technical leadership & vision

As a Staff AI Engineer, you will be the hands‑on technical lead for Agentic Shopping. You will own technical direction, architecture and model‑strategy decisions; solve the hardest production challenges yourself; and establish evaluation, observability, safety and fallback patterns that other teams can reuse.

Tricks of the trade

• Build Picnic's shopping assistant: Lead the technical direction for agentic shopping experiences that help millions of people plan and shop effortlessly.
• Technical leadership & architecture: Lead the system architecture for multi-turn conversational agents, balancing latency, safety guardrails, and inference costs. Technically mentor engineers across the organization to execute on building production-grade agentic systems.
• Rapid prototyping & productionization: Drive a fast-paced, iterative engineering cadence. Build initial prototypes, establish architectural patterns, and write production code when necessary to unblock complex technical challenges.
• Model fine-tuning & context engineering: Design and implement systems architectures for multi-turn, conversational agents using open-weight models and techniques like fine-tuning, distillation, and RAG.
• Evaluation & safety feedback loops: Establish continuous offline and online evaluation for mission completion, basket correctness, customer effort, clarification quality, acceptance and corrections, safety, reliability, latency and cost.
• Cross-functional alignment: Collaborate with product, design, and product teams to define technical trade-offs, align on agent capabilities, and ensure a seamless, safe user experience.

We're looking for

• 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. Experience with tools such as PyTorch, LangGraph, vLLM, Pydantic AI, Qdrant or DeepEval is useful, or similar framework tools is required.

+ Bonus points

• Experience taking retrieval, ranking or recommendation models from problem definition to measurable production impact
• In-depth expertise in deep learning for sequence modelling, representation learning, or retrieval and ranking
• A degree in Computer Science, AI (or a related field), a PhD, open‑source contributions, or peer-reviewed research are considered strong pluses

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.
• Health insurance discount & bike plan 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
• Relocation 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 r