AI Lead

AI Lead | Fully Remote Europe | Up to €140k

This is not a research role.

It’s not a “Head of AI” job where you spend your week in roadmap meetings.

And it’s definitely not a role for someone who stopped building three years ago.

I’m working with a fast-growing European AI product company looking for an AI Lead to take ownership of its AI engineering function.

The sweet spot?

Someone who has been the first or one of the first AI hires, built something real, then built a team around themselves, without completely handing the engineering off.

The role is roughly:

60–70% leadership

Hiring, mentoring, roadmap ownership, engineering standards, team development and shaping how AI is built across the company.

30–40% hands-on

Architecture, critical implementation, evaluation, production issues and staying technically credible with the engineers around you.

You’ll be working across areas like:

• Agentic AI & multi-agent systems
• RAG, embeddings, retrieval & reranking
• Tool calling, MCP & orchestration
• Evals, golden datasets & LLM-as-a-judge
• Observability, guardrails & production reliability
• Python / FastAPI / production backend systems
• Latency, cost and model-performance optimisation

The backgrounds I’m particularly interested in:

• AI / ML leaders who originally came through engineering
• Founding or early AI engineers who have since built teams

Browse our curated collection of remote jobs across all categories and industries, featuring positions from top companies worldwide.

• Engineering Managers who still genuinely code
• Heads of AI / ML who haven’t become completely hands-off
• Technical founders or CTOs who want to build a function inside a high-growth product company

You should have real people-leadership experience: hiring, 1:1s, performance conversations, developing engineers and building teams, not just mentoring or being the most senior person in the room.

And when I ask:

“What’s the last production AI system you personally built or debugged?”

…I’m hoping you have a very recent answer.

🌍 Fully remote across Europe / CET-friendly

💰 Up to €140k

🏗️ Genuine opportunity to shape the AI function

🤖 Production AI already sits at the heart of the product

If you’re the person who built the first version, hired the next few engineers and still knows exactly what is happening in production, I’d like to speak with you.

Drop me a message or apply directly.