Principal AI Engineer

Principal AI Engineer | Enterprise AI Innovation | Cologne (Hybrid)

Location: Cologne (Hybrid)

Package: Flexible depending on experience and impact

AI Futures have been retained to identify a Principal AI Engineer for a major organisation investing heavily in Generative AI, intelligent automation and enterprise AI platforms.

This is a rare opportunity to join a business where AI is a strategic priority. You'll work on large-scale AI initiatives, influence technical direction and help shape the next generation of AI products and platforms across the organisation.

The role combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership, making it ideal for experienced AI professionals looking to drive innovation while remaining close to cutting-edge technology.

The Role

• Design and build enterprise-scale AI applications and platforms.
• Develop production-ready Generative AI, LLM and Agentic AI solutions.
• Architect scalable RAG pipelines and intelligent automation workflows.
• Partner with Product, Engineering and Data Science teams to deliver AI solutions into production.
• Provide technical leadership across AI initiatives and mentor engineering teams.
• Drive AI best practices across architecture, deployment and model lifecycle management.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and influence future technical direction.
• Support enterprise AI adoption across multiple business functions.

The Candidate

• Strong commercial experience building production AI solutions.
• Background in AI Engineering, Applied AI, Machine Learning Engineering or AI Architecture.
• Hands-on experience with Generative AI, LLMs and modern AI frameworks.
• Experience with RAG, AI Agents, LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex or similar technologies.
• Strong Python software engineering skills.
• Experience deploying scalable AI applications in Azure, AWS or GCP.
• Comfortable leading technical discussions and mentoring engineers.
• Fluent German and English.

Desirable Experience

• Multi-agent AI systems.
• AI Platform Engineering.
• MLOps and AI Infrastructure.
• Vector databases and semantic search.
• Kubernetes, Docker and cloud-native technologies.
• Experience building enterprise AI products from concept through to production.

Why Join?

• Work on enterprise-scale AI initiatives with significant technical ownership.
• Influence the architecture and direction of next-generation AI platforms.
• Collaborate with experienced AI Engineers, Data Scientists and technical leaders.
• High level of autonomy within a collaborative engineering culture.
• Join an organisation making significant long-term investment in Artificial Intelligence.
• Opportunity to solve complex AI challenges with real-world business impact.

AI Futures Ltd | Filling the AI Skills Gap ®