Staff AI Engineer: Lead Agentic Shopping Systems

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

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.