Staff AI Engineer: Lead Multi-Turn Shopping AI

Teampicnic; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Teamwork makes the dream work

Diversity across 3 countries

Make a difference in startup env.

Fresh lunch, coffee and snacks

Health insurance discount & bike plan

Relocation support

Job summary

Picnic in Amsterdam is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to lead the technical direction for agentic shopping. You will own architecture for multi-turn conversational agents, supervise model strategy, and build production-grade systems that balance latency, safety and cost.

You will mentor engineers, shape evaluation loops, and collaborate with product and design to deliver trusted, scalable AI experiences. This is a hands-on role with open-weight LLMs, RAG pipelines, and tooling like PyTorch,

Qualifications

• Proven track record of taking complex multi-turn AI systems from design to production.
• Experience training, fine-tuning and optimizing open-weight LLMs for production deployment.
• Hands-on experience building production RAG systems, context management, and state handling for multi-turn dialogues.
• Experience designing robust evaluation loops, continuous monitoring, and automated safety guardrails for customer-facing apps.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction, perform design reviews, and mentor engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction for agentic shopping experiences that scale to millions of users.
• Own system architecture for multi-turn conversational agents, balancing latency, safety, and cost.
• Drive rapid prototyping and productionization, establishing patterns and writing production code when needed.
• Design architectures for fine-tuning, distillation, and RAG to improve accuracy and efficiency.
• Establish evaluation, safety feedback loops, and monitoring across offline and online settings.
• Collaborate with product and design teams to define trade-offs and ensure a safe user experience.

Skills

Python

Open-weight LLMs

Production RAG

Context management

Multi-turn AI

Technical leadership

Education

Degree in Computer Science or AI

Tools

PyTorch

LangGraph

vLLM

Pydantic AI

Qdrant

DeepEval

Job description

Picnic in Amsterdam is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to lead the technical direction for agentic shopping. You will own architecture for multi-turn conversational agents, supervise model strategy, and build production-grade systems that balance latency, safety and cost.

You will mentor engineers, shape evaluation loops, and collaborate with product and design to deliver trusted, scalable AI experiences. This is a hands-on role with open-weight LLMs, RAG pipelines, and tooling like PyTorch,