Senior Applied AI Engineer - Generative AI

About MXP

MXP (MarineXchange) builds the software that runs cruise operations. Around 100 people develop and support a modular platform used by leading cruise lines — from property management and point of sale to itinerary planning, supply chain and port operations. Our customers run 24/7 operations at sea, which makes reliable delivery not a nice-to-have but the product itself.

MXP is in the middle of a deliberate step change: from a company that grew on expertise, to a professionally managed one with clear standards, measurable delivery and modern ways of working. Artificial intelligence is one of the strongest levers in that change — not as a future vision, but in the processes our people run every day.

Purpose of the role

You find the places where MXP loses time, quality or money to manual work — and you fix them with AI and automation, one use case after another. Not in a lab and not in a slide deck, but in the daily work of support, development, testing, implementation, finance, HR and sales, measured by the hours and errors the organisation no longer has.

The mandate is not to write an AI strategy. The mandate is to ship working solutions, fast — and to make the whole company able to work this way.

This is a builder role with a direct line to the CEO and supported by the CTO. You will have access to every function, the freedom to choose the tools that work, and the responsibility to show results within weeks, not quarters. If the model proves itself, you will build a small team around it.

Key responsibilities

Use cases — find them, ship them

• Systematically identify the AI opportunities with the highest value across MXP. Support, development, quality assurance, release, customer implementations, finance, HR, sales, etc-. - and keep them in one prioritised backlog, ranked by impact and effort.

• Deliver solutions end to end: from a working prototype in days to a solution in daily use, with a named business owner and a measured effect.

• Take the fastest route that works: use and configure what the market already offers before building anything; build only where it creates a real, lasting advantage.

• Automate workflows across our systems using large language models, agents, retrieval (RAG), APIs and automation platforms.

• Hand over every solution in a state the business can run — documented, owned and measured — and move on to the next one.

Enablement — make the company AI-fluent

• Raise practical AI literacy across MXP: hands-on training, clinics and role-specific prompt and workflow libraries — so every employee uses AI competently in their own work.

• Build a network of AI champions in the functions who carry good practice into their teams and multiply what works.

• Equip engineering with state-of-the-art AI-assisted development – coding assistants, agentic development, AI in testing and documentation – so that a meaningful share of engineering capacity moves from firefighting to building.

• Act as the internal reference point for the question "can AI do this?" — and give a straight answer, including "no".

Ways of working — set the standard

• Establish state-of-the-art AI working practices as the default, not the exception: which tools, for which tasks, with which data.

• With the CTO: Own the company's AI tool landscape and licences — lean, secure and cost-transparent.

• With the AI team: Put practical guardrails in place: usage rules, data protection, information security and the requirements of the EU AI Act – proportionate, enabling and understood by everyone.

• Track a market that changes monthly, test what matters, and bring relevant developments into MXP early.

Product — accelerate where it counts

• Support product and engineering in moving AI features of our cruise platform from pilot into production.

• Contribute applied generative AI expertise to customer-facing use cases where it shortens the path to revenue.

What success looks like after twelve months

• A visible track record: ten or more AI use cases in daily productive use, each with an owner and a measured effect on time, quality or cost.

• Capacity freed by AI in key processes is a figure the leadership group sees every month.

• Every employee has been trained in the practical use of AI in their role; use of approved tools is broad and growing.

• AI-assisted development is standard practice in engineering, and its effect on throughput and quality is measurable.

• A lean AI tool landscape and a usage policy, including the EU AI Act essentials, are in place and lived.

• A prioritised use-case pipeline tied to business goals, and a decision-ready proposal on whether and how to grow the function into a small team.

What you bring

Essential

• A strong background in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer science, data science or a comparable field: academic and professional is a must have.

• A proven generative AI track record: you have personally designed and shipped several GenAI solutions into productive use and can show them; not only proofs of concept.

• Hands-on depth across the current GenAI stack: models of the leading providers, prompt and context engineering, retrieval (RAG), agents and tool use, evaluation, and API integration.

• Solid engineering skills: Python and/or TypeScript, APIs, data handling, cloud services.

• Experience with workflow automation and integration platforms (e.g. n8n, Make, Power Automate) and with enterprise AI tools such as AI assistants and coding assistants.

• Process thinking: you understand a business process before you automate it, and you measure the result afterwards.

• The ability to enable others: you train, explain and convince technical and non-technical colleagues alike.

• Fluent in German and English, written and spoken.

Desirable

• Experience in a software or B2B SaaS company, ideally a scale-up or owner-led company making the step to professional management.

• Familiarity with AI governance, GDPR, information security and the EU AI Act.

• Experience with classical machine learning alongside generative AI.

• Background in cruise, maritime, hospitality or travel technology.

How you work

• You ship. A working solution next week beats a perfect concept next quarter.

• You are pragmatic and tool-agnostic: you pick what works, not what is fashionable; and you drop what does not.

• You are relentlessly curious and keep pace with a field that reinvents itself every few months.

• You think in business outcomes, not in models.

• You bring people along, and leave every team more capable — not more dependent on you.

Who you work with

CEO (direct report), CTO, CFO, Director People, Culture & Communication, AI team, module owners across the product portfolio, development, quality assurance, release management and support, the Transformation Office, and our development team. In short: everyone at MXP whose work could be faster, better or easier.

Why this role is worth taking

Few roles give one person direct access to every process in a company, a CEO who wants AI used everywhere, and the freedom to choose the tools. MXP is small enough that your work changes how the whole company operates within months, within a company that grows, is healthy and has a market-leading platform in a specialised industry. Prove the model, and you build the team.

Benefits & Perks

• Rapid professional growth at the leading software supplier in the cruise industry

• Secure, long-term employment in a fast-growing industry

• A work environment with exciting and varied tasks

• A great working atmosphere in a highly motivated and successful team with international corporate culture

• Austria: The minimum salary stipulated by the applicabel IT collective agreement is € 4.476.- gross per month on a full-time employment (14 payments per year). Depending on your professional qualifications and experience, an overpayment is possible.

• International/Other Countries: For positions outside Austria, compensation is based on local market conditions and legal requirements.