Lead AI Engineer (m/w/d)

Role Summary

EMPOWER EVERY EMPLOYEE.

Flip is the leading AI-powered employee experience platform for frontline workers. We are revolutionizing how the people who keep the world running work - in retail, manufacturing and logistics. An app. One touch. Everything you need.

Our mission: Connect every employee to everything they need in one touch.

JOB ADVERTISING

AI orchestration is at the heart of Flip's future. Flip Fusion, a multi-agent code generation system, is at the heart of our latest product. The Ask AI Agent Gateway and automation through Flip Flows also run on capabilities that our AI engineers develop and maintain.

As a lead AI engineer, you take on the AI discipline: You are responsible for the how, i.e. architecture, standards and technical orientation, across all three areas, lead and further develop a team of three AI engineers and remain hands-on on the most demanding problems.

Responsibilities

WHAT AWAITS YOU

• Responsible for AI architecture: Define and align a coherent AI architecture and uniform standards for Flip Fusion, the Ask AI Agent Gateway and Flip Flows.
• Accept the biggest challenge: Multi-agent systems that are built for specific use cases, but remain generic enough to serve different customers, always in the area of tension between high demands, feasibility, reliability and cost efficiency.
• Lead and develop the discipline: Take disciplinary leadership for three AI engineers and help them develop into engineers who set the technical benchmark for themselves.
• Stay hands-on: You spend around 70 percent of your time in code, on the problems where your judgment counts most. The rest goes to technical and disciplinary leadership.
• Influence across products: Implement architecture decisions with the product managers and engineering leads who are responsible for the roadmaps that are not in your area, and convince through the better argument rather than through instructions.
• Working with our stack: Python, pydantic-ai for orchestration, Qdrant for vector search, Azure AI for models, deployed on Kubernetes in a predominantly JVM-based (Kotlin, Micronaut) and Go backend.
• Help shape a young discipline: AI engineering is so new at Flip that there is enormous scope for design and there is no fixed playbook yet.

Requirements

We are looking for an engineer with a solid software engineering foundation and real-world experience with agent-based systems in production who wants to lead a discipline rather than just work on a codebase. If the role appeals to you but you don't meet every point, we still look forward to receiving your application.

• 7+ years of experience in software development with a proven track record at senior or staff level, building on a solid software engineering foundation (backend, platform or full-stack).
• Practical experience in the design, construction and operation of productive LLM-based systems: RAG, tool calling and MCP, orchestration and Evals. Not prototypes, but systems that you lived with even after the go-live.
• Experience with multi-agent orchestration, which is given particular weight. This is the core of what you would be responsible for architecturally.
• Proven technical leadership experience: architectural responsibility, tech lead responsibility, RFCs, design reviews or setting standards for a team.
• Demonstrated ability to advance technical work that is not your own responsibility: You win architectural discussions through persuasion and credibility and are used to being right without having the power to make decisions.
• Evidence that you are developing people: coaching or mentoring engineers to become stronger engineers, rather than doing the work for them.
• A clear, explicit commitment to disciplinary leadership. This role involves managing three engineers, and that's not the part you take on just to get the technical scope.
• Strong communication skills and business fluent English (C1).

Nice to haves

• Formal experience in human resources management: disciplinary leadership, feedback and development discussions, recruiting. Strong mentoring experience counts just as much.
• Experience in leading a discipline or department across teams in a matrix organization.
• Product experience at scale: frontline/deskless worker, high-volume B2B SaaS or similar.
• Experience in cost, latency and reliability engineering for LLM systems: guardrails, fallbacks, evaluation harnesses.
• Knowledge of German at any level. Helpful in parts of the company, but never a requirement for this role.

Benefits

WHAT WE OFFER YOU

• Work mode: We are remote-first, giving you the flexibility to work from home. At the same time, we greatly value the added value of personal collaboration. Depending on your role, you will occasionally take part in team events, workshops or meetings in our offices in Berlin or Stuttgart - of course always with sufficient advance notice. We will discuss the exact ratio transparently during your application process.
• Work-life balance: We don't want you to get stuck in your desk chair and that's why we cover the costs for your E-Gym Wellpass membership and offer job bike leasing.
• Celebrate success: Highly motivated and committed people await you in a relaxed working atmosphere.
• Right in the middle instead of just there: You actively shape Flip. At the same time, you are an enabler of the rapid growth process of a young tech company and grow towards your goals. Good mood guaranteed.
• Happy to be a Flipster: Look forward to regular team events and culture days that bring us together as Flipsters.
• Working abroad: At Flip you can also work in other European countries, let's talk about workation in the interview.

To make our job advertisements easier to read, we use the male form of salutation throughout the text. Everyone is welcome at Flip, no matter what gender you are or how old you are. Sexual identity, origin, religion, worldview and disabilities play no role. The most important thing is that YOU fit in with us!