Lead AI Engineer | AI-Native Startup | BerlinLocation: Berlin (On-site)Employment: Full-timePackage: Competitive salary + EquityAI Futures has been exclusively retained to identify a Lead AI Engineer for a well-funded, early-stage AI startup based in Berlin.The company is building an enterprise AI product and is looking for an experienced engineer to take significant ownership of the AI architecture, technical direction and development of its core AI systems.This is a hands-on role. You'll still spend a significant amount of time building, while also making the architectural decisions and setting the technical standards required to scale the product and engineering team.The OpportunityThe challenge isn't simply connecting an application to an LLM.You'll be building the infrastructure required to make AI agents reliable enough for real-world enterprise use, designing how they reason, access information, interact with tools and complete complex workflows.You'll have significant freedom over how these systems are designed and will work closely with the founding and engineering teams as the product scales.What You'll Be DoingLead the architecture and development of production LLM and Agentic AI systems.Design sophisticated AI agent workflows and orchestration.Build systems that enable AI agents to interact with data, software and external tools.Develop approaches for managing context and complex multi-step tasks.Build evaluation systems to understand and continuously improve AI performance.Investigate failures and edge cases within production AI systems.Improve the quality, reliability, latency and cost of LLM-powered applications.Evaluate models and determine the right technical approach for different product requirements.Build reusable AI infrastructure that enables the wider engineering team to ship quickly.Make important architecture and system design decisions.Remain deeply hands-on with engineering and implementation.Mentor other engineers and help establish technical standards.Work directly with the founding team on AI and product strategy.Contribute to future technical hiring as the company grows.Who We're Looking ForStrong background in AI Engineering, Machine Learning Engineering or AI-focused Software Engineering.Experience personally building and shipping LLM-powered products into production.Strong understanding of Agentic AI and multi-step AI workflows.Experience working with areas such as tool use, orchestration, context management and structured outputs.Practical understanding of LLM evaluation and production monitoring.Strong software engineering and system design fundamentals.Experience designing architecture rather than simply implementing predefined specifications.Comfortable debugging unpredictable AI behaviour and improving system reliability.Strong understanding of the trade-offs between model quality, latency and cost.Product mindset and focus on building technology that customers actually use.High level of ownership and comfort operating with ambiguity.Experience leading, mentoring or providing technical direction to other engineers is highly desirable.Founding Engineer, pre-seed, seed or Series A experience would be particularly attractive.Why Join?Take a leading role in building a production Agentic AI platform.Join while the company and engineering organisation are still at an early stage.Work directly with the founding team.Own significant parts of the AI architecture and technical roadmap.Solve difficult engineering problems around agents, evaluation and production reliability.Stay highly hands-on while taking increasing technical leadership.Help shape engineering standards, culture and future hiring.Significant scope for the position to grow as the company scales.Meaningful equity participation and long-term upside.Work alongside an ambitious technical team in Berlin.We're particularly interested in engineers who have experienced the pace and ownership of an early-stage startup and now want a bigger technical mandate.If you've built production LLM or Agentic AI systems and want ownership over the architecture, product and future engineering organisation, please apply for a confidential discussion.AI Futures Ltd | Filling the AI Skills Gap®

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Head of Artificial Intelligence