Lead AI Engineer | AI-Native Startup | Berlin
Location: Berlin (Onsite)
Employment: Full-time
Package: Competitive salary + Equity
AI Futures has been exclusively retained to identify a Lead AI Engineer for an early-stage, well-funded AI startup in Berlin.
The company is building a sophisticated AI-native enterprise platform and is looking for an experienced engineer to take technical ownership of the infrastructure behind its AI systems.
This is a genuinely hands-on leadership role for someone who has already built production LLM and Agentic AI systems and wants significantly more influence over architecture, product and engineering direction.
The Opportunity
You'll take ownership of some of the hardest engineering problems involved in moving AI agents from impressive prototypes into reliable production systems.
You'll work across agent architecture, orchestration, context, tool use, evaluation and infrastructure, while remaining close to the product and the engineers building on top of the platform.
This isn't a research-only position. The focus is on shipping AI systems that real customers can depend on.
What You'll Be Doing
- Design and build the core infrastructure behind production AI agents.
- Develop sophisticated agent orchestration, context and memory systems.
- Build systems that allow agents to interact safely with tools, data and external environments.
- Design reliable approaches to multi-step and long-running AI workflows.
- Build evaluation frameworks to measure the quality and reliability of AI systems.
- Investigate production failures and use them to continuously improve the platform.
- Own aspects of model integration and inference infrastructure.
- Improve model quality, latency, reliability and cost.
- Build shared AI infrastructure that enables other engineers to ship new capabilities quickly.
- Make major architectural decisions as the product scales.
- Remain highly hands-on while providing technical leadership to the wider engineering team.
- Work closely with founders and senior engineers on product and technology direction.
What We're Looking For
- Strong AI Engineering / Software Engineering background.
- Experience personally shipping LLM-powered products into production.
- Deep understanding of Agentic AI, including tool use, context management and multi-step workflows.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals.
- Strong TypeScript experience; Python experience is advantageous.
- Experience designing robust systems around the unpredictable behaviour of LLMs.
- Practical experience with LLM evaluation, observability or production failure analysis.
- Exposure to inference infrastructure, secure execution environments or similarly complex production systems.
- Strong architecture and system design ability.
- Product mindset - you care about what customers actually use, not simply technical sophistication.
- Comfortable taking ownership of ambiguous problems and making independent technical decisions.
- Experience leading, mentoring or enabling other engineers is highly desirable.
Early-stage experience is particularly interesting.
We're especially keen to speak with engineers who have previously worked as a Founding Engineer, early technical hire, or within a pre-seed, seed or Series A startup.
Why Join?
- Take technical ownership of a core Agentic AI platform.
- Join an AI startup while the engineering organisation is still being shaped.
- Work directly with the founding team.
- Solve difficult problems around agents, inference, evaluation and production reliability.
- Significant influence over architecture and technical direction.
- Remain deeply hands-on while growing your technical leadership.
- Help establish the engineering culture and standards as the team expands.
- Meaningful equity participation and long-term upside.
- Work alongside an ambitious technical team in Berlin.
We're looking for someone who wants the ownership and pace of an early-stage company, not simply another Senior Engineering position.
If you've built production Agentic AI or LLM systems and want to take ownership of what comes next, apply for a confidential discussion.
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