Team Lead - AI Engineering

About Us

1GLOBAL is a technology-driven global mobile communications provider, delivering global connectivity solutions to enterprises and consumers. Powered by a best-in-class telecom platform - including its own owned and operated global mobile core network, fully fledged in-house developed eSIM technology, and an extensive portfolio of telecom licenses - 1GLOBAL operates as a fully regulated telecommunications provider across 40 countries worldwide.

We serve many of the world’s leading banks, enterprises, and digital-first businesses, including neo-banks, global fast moving consumer goods companies, travel leaders, and payment service providers. Today, 1GLOBAL connects more than 70 million people and devices globally, enabling our customers to launch, scale, and innovate with confidence in the mobile ecosystem.

1GLOBAL is a profitable, fast-growing business. With full-year revenues in 2025 exceeding US$200 million and profits of over US$25 million, we generate strong cash flows to fund our growth allowing us to continuously invest in infrastructure, platform innovation, and global expansion. Recent years have marked a defining phase in our journey, with major enterprise and mass-consumer client wins accelerating our evolution into a global mobile connectivity powerhouse, purpose-built to enable consumer brands to enter and succeed with their own aspirations to offer telecommunications services to their clients.

Founded in 2022 by experienced technology entrepreneurs, Hakan Koç and Pyrros Koussios, 1GLOBAL has rapidly emerged as a European technology leader shaping the future of global telecommunications. We operate as a fully regulated Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) in 12 countries and as a regulated telecom operator in an additional 28 markets. Headquartered in the Netherlands, with world-class R&D hubs in Lisbon, Berlin, and São Paulo, our team of close to 500 experts across 15 countries is united by a single ambition: to redefine global mobile connectivity through technology, scale, and execution excellence.

About the Team

We are building a new AI team within Engineering, tasked with driving AI adoption across 1GLOBAL. The team’s mission is to make AI a practical, governed, and well-supported capability for every part of the company, from the engineers writing our software to the operations teams running the business. Beyond the internal platform, the team will contribute AI-powered capabilities to our commercial product lines.

This is the founding leadership hire for the function. As Team Lead, you will own the engineering delivery of this function. You will hire and grow the team, set technical standards, and be accountable for the platform’s reliability, performance, and evolution. You will work closely with a dedicated product manager and report into Engineering leadership.

About the Role

• Lead the AI Engineering team: hire, mentor, and develop engineers while fostering a culture of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement.

• Own Central AI platform development and governance: AWS Bedrock fronted by an LLM gateway (LiteLLM, Portkey, or similar). Token budgets, rate limits, key management, guardrails, audit logging, observability, cost controls.

• Own the technical architecture of 1GLOBAL’s internal AI tools and MCP servers, including RAG pipelines, vector search, LLM integration, and conversational interfaces.

• Drive architectural decisions across the AI stack, balancing speed of delivery with long-term scalability and maintainability.

• Collaborate with product management, operations, and commercial teams to prioritize high-impact use cases and translate them into engineering plans.

• Establish and enforce engineering standards: code quality, testing strategies, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and model evaluation frameworks.

• Manage the full software development lifecycle for AI services, ensuring reliable production operations and clear incident response.

• Stay hands-on: contribute to design, code reviews, and critical implementation work, especially in the early phase of the team’s growth.

• Coordinate with security and compliance teams to ensure AI systems meet 1GLOBAL’s regulatory obligations (ISO 27001, GSMA SAS, data classification).

Requirements

About You

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a technical leadership leading projects, mentoring engineers, setting direction.

• Proven ability to hire, develop, and retain strong engineering talent. You have built or significantly grown a team before.

• Strong backend fundamentals: API design, microservices, distributed systems, production operations. Python proficiency expected.

• Hands-on experience with AI gateways or model routing layers (LiteLLM, Portkey, AWS Bedrock) - guardrails, token limits, observability, cost management.

• Working knowledge of RAG, vector search, and LLM evaluation. Depth here is a plus, not a prerequisite.

• Practical experience with MCP servers, or strong fluency with similar tool-calling and agent integration patterns.

• Power user of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, or similar). The kind of person who would define how an engineering organization adopts them.

• Comfortable with CI/CD, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code.

• Familiarity with data security practices - PII handling, access controls, data classification. Experience in regulated environments (telecommunications, financial services, ISO 27001, GSMA SAS) is an advantage.

• Excellent communicator. You can align technical and non-technical stakeholders around a shared roadmap. Fluent in English.

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity. You will be defining the team’s ways of working, not inheriting them.

Benefits

Why 1GLOBAL?

• Foundational Role: Build the AI function from the ground up, setting architectural direction and engineering culture for everything that follows.
• Growth Opportunities: Advance your career in one of the fastest growing telecommunications companies, expanding over 100% year-on-year.
• Talented Team: Collaborate with experienced founders, a strong senior management team, and driven individuals across 15 countries.
• Dynamic Environment: Fast-paced, innovation-driven workplace where every contribution counts.
• International Reach: Opportunities to work across 1GLOBAL offices worldwide as you grow within the company.

1GLOBAL is an equal opportunity employer, we value your character as much as your talent. Diversity drives our innovation, and we offer a collaborative, dynamic, and international work environment. We are excited for you to join our mission to revolutionise connectivity globally.