AI Tech Lead

📌 Role Overview

We're looking for a Squad Technical Lead (STL) to steer the engineering side of our AI Platform squad, uphold technical excellence, and push forward AI solutions that fit our business goals.

The squad's mission is to bring AI into the organization: the AI platform itself and the AI-powered tools our colleagues rely on every day. For us, the platform is the product — and our customers are our own colleagues. The Product Owner leads the squad and owns what we build and why; you'll lead the engineers and own how it gets built, how well, and how safely it reaches our users. This is a hands-on role — you'll keep building shoulder to shoulder with the team.

🎯 Responsibilities

🔹 Own the technical direction and architecture of the squad's products, shaped together with the engineers and captured as documented decisions rather than tribal knowledge.

🔹 Build the squad's delivery engine: pipelines, environments, and quality gates, with full continuous delivery as the goal.

🔹 Pick the right tool for each problem: reach for AI where AI genuinely fits, and something simpler where it doesn't.

🔹 Make decisions jointly with the Product Owner: bring feasibility, cost, and sequencing to the table, challenge scope openly, and commit once priorities are set.

🔹 Line-manage the squad's engineers and QA through 1:1s, feedback, and growth, guiding the team's move into AI Engineer roles.

🔹 Lead a self-managing team: frame the work, clear blockers, and offer direction, rather than handing out tasks.

🔹 Own engineering quality standards, incident response, and security for the squad's products.

🔹 Represent the squad in Engineering Alignment and cross-squad technical forums, carrying the squad's needs outward and company standards back in.

🛠 Requirements

✅ Proven track record as a Tech Lead or similar leadership role, including line-managing engineers.

✅ A strong hands-on engineering background and the appetite to keep building as a lead.

✅ Experience building and running LLM-based products in production (RAG, agents, tool calling, evaluation).

✅ Sound engineering judgement — knowing when AI is the right call and when a simpler solution wins.

✅ A solid grasp of software architecture, cloud computing, and microservices.

✅ Experience setting up CI/CD pipelines and delivery processes.

✅ Strong leadership and mentoring skills, with real enthusiasm for coaching engineers and growing self-managing teams.

✅ Effective communication skills.

✨ Nice to Have

➕ Development expertise with proficiency in .NET and/or Python.

➕ Experience operating Azure, including Azure AI Foundry or Azure OpenAI.

➕ Experience applying AI to software development — using AI coding assistants and agentic workflows in day-to-day engineering.

➕ Experience building AI agents and skills, MCP servers, and LLM gateways.

➕ Experience with mobile applications (native iOS and Android).

➕ Familiarity with containerization and Kubernetes.

➕ Knowledge of AI security and compliance (EU AI Act, data handling).

🧭 Your First 6 Months

By the end of your first six months, we'd expect you to have:

🏁 Defined a documented architecture and technical direction that the engineers helped shape and build on.

🏁 Made the path from merge to production clear — and steadily shorter — with no blocker left without an owner.

🏁 Personally shipped something meaningful to production.

🏁 Set up regular 1:1s and a growth path for each engineer, and co-written the AI Engineer role definitions with the Product Owner.

🏁 Woven security into how work is defined and reviewed, with each product's data and access documented.

🏁 Become the squad's technical voice alongside other squads and STLs.