Staff AI Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff AI Engineer, Payments Intelligence based in Germany.

As a Staff AI Engineer, you’ll serve as a senior technical leader responsible for shaping the architecture and delivery of AI systems at the core of a global payments platform.

• Lead the architecture and technical direction of AI agents and Payments Intelligence systems, including multi-step agents, tool use, orchestration, memory, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Design, develop, and productionize LLM and agentic AI systems engineered for reliability, scalability, low latency, and high-quality outcomes.
• Build intelligent conversational experiences capable of engaging customers dynamically across channels such as phone and messaging platforms, including multilingual interactions across 70+ languages.
• Develop AI solutions that retrieve payment information, recover revenue from failed transactions, automate internal operations, support customers, and generate actionable merchant insights.
• Establish rigorous approaches to AI evaluation, observability, safety, and guardrails to ensure reliable behavior in a compliance-sensitive, multi-market environment.
• Architect data and intelligence products that transform complex payment data into actionable insights for merchants.
• Define responsible practices for using AI-assisted development tools throughout the design, evaluation, and deployment lifecycle.
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and senior engineering stakeholders to deliver complex, cross-functional AI initiatives.
• Mentor engineers, promote strong engineering standards, and raise the technical bar for AI development across the organization.
• Own technical outcomes from system architecture through production deployment, with a focus on measurable impact and continuous improvement.

• Extensive software engineering experience with a proven track record of building and shipping production LLM or AI-agent systems.
• Deep expertise in agentic AI systems, including multi-step agents, tool use, orchestration, memory, and RAG.
• Strong LLM application development skills, including prompt engineering, evaluation, testing, and safety guardrails.
• Advanced Python skills for AI/ML development, combined with strong backend engineering capabilities in Go and/or Kotlin.
• Experience with model serving, LLM inference, and cloud infrastructure for running AI workloads in production, ideally with AWS or a comparable platform.
• Hands-on experience with AI evaluation and observability platforms such as LangFuse, LangSmith, Braintrust, or MLflow.
• Strong knowledge of automated testing and CI/CD practices for reliable production systems.
• Proven technical leadership experience, including mentoring engineers, defining technical vision, and delivering complex cross-team projects.
• Advanced written and spoken English proficiency.
• Experience with fine-tuning, RLHF, or model customization is advantageous.
• Familiarity with vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, or FAISS and embedding-based retrieval.
• Experience building agent workflows using MCP servers or modern agent frameworks.
• Knowledge of conversational AI, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and multilingual AI systems is a plus.
• Previous experience in payments, fintech, or another highly regulated environment is preferred.
• Experience operating multi-tenant AI platforms or managing GPU and AI resources at scale is beneficial.
• Familiarity with data pipelines and orchestration tools such as Airflow or Prefect, and data warehouses such as Databricks, Snowflake, or BigQuery, is a plus.
• Spanish proficiency is considered an additional advantage.
• Strong ownership, curiosity, problem-solving ability, and a hands-on approach to technical leadership.

• Competitive compensation.
• Fully remote working environment with the flexibility to work from anywhere.
• One-time home office allowance to help you create an effective workspace.
• Work equipment provided.
• Stock options.
• Health plan available wherever you are.
• Flexible days off.
• Language, professional, and personal development courses.
• Opportunity to work on advanced AI and agentic systems operating at significant production scale.
• International and distributed environment with collaboration across multiple markets and technical disciplines.