Senior AI Engineer

Before you read further

HelloPrint is on a mission to become the world's leading infrastructure for customizable printed products. From our offices in Rotterdam and Valencia, 100+ professionals from 20+ nationalities are building an AI-first company that scales output faster than headcount. We're at EUR 100M revenue and aiming to disrupt a trillion-dollar industry. Every hire we make needs to help get us there.

• Commercial instinct first, engineering second. You think about what something is worth before you think about how to build it.

• Full-time in Rotterdam. Five days a week, in the building where the transformation is happening. This is not negotiable.

• Always on mentality. This is not a 40-hour job; it’s a deliberate choice into something big that requires “what it takes”

• You have been building since before it was a career. Side projects, tools, systems nobody asked for. The obsession came first.

• You ship continuously. You ship fast and you ship real systems. Not prototypes, not demos.

• You are more than just an engineer. You understand product decisions, user impact, and design tradeoffs. You do not need a PM to translate the business problem for you.

Why this role exists:

We're rebuilding the entire platform: new frontend, new pricing engine, new content engine, new product engine, everything ready for an agentic future. No one on the team writes code manually for what these systems handle. You'll work inside this rebuild, under the direction of our founding team (Hans, CEO, and Michael, CIO/Chief AI Officer), executing on high-leverage AI problems with real commercial impact, visible immediately in revenue or cost. There's no management layer between you and the outcome. You build, you ship, you measure, you move to the next problem.

Requirements

This role is not for people who got into AI because it became important. It is for people who have been building since before anyone called it a career. The kind of person who coded as a teenager, shipped their first thing before anyone asked, and has never really stopped. Who finds it genuinely difficult to explain why they build: it is just what they do. Who would rather spend a Sunday solving a hard systems problem than almost anything else. If you have to think about whether that description fits you, it probably does not.

This role will resonate with a specific kind of person. You will recognise yourself in one of these profiles:

• You are a strong engineer inside a startup or scale-up, shipping real features and systems, but three or four layers removed from the business decisions your work actually drives. You want to be closer to the number your code moves, not further away from it.

• Or you are building on your own: side projects, freelance work, an AI SaaS or open-source tool nobody asked you to build. You've proven you can ship alone, but you're doing it without the customer base, the data, or the stability to make it count at scale. HelloPrint gives you 600,000 customers to build on immediately.

• Or you are early in your career but not in your building. You've been writing code since before it paid you to, you've got real production work behind you already, and you're looking for the place that lets that intensity be the job instead of something you do around it.

What you will build:

The opportunity surface is large: 14 markets, 600,000 customers, a platform being rebuilt in parallel across four core engines. You'll work on problems from areas like:

• Dynamic pricing and margin optimization across markets.

• Agentic procurement: supplier selection, ordering, quality management.

• Customer journey automation from configuration to post-delivery.

• Intelligent content and SEO infrastructure at platform scale.

• Predictive demand and inventory across the supplier network.

• Internal tooling that multiplies the output of every team.

Who you are:

You've built and shipped real production systems, not just contributed to someone else's. You're comfortable with ambiguity and don't need a fully specified brief to start. You care about what your work is worth, not just whether it works. You want to build inside a company that's already proven, not another 0-to-1 bet. You do not think of yourself as an AI engineer. You think of yourself as someone who solves hard problems and builds the systems to prove it. The engineering is the method. The obsession is the identity.

Three signals that tell us you are that person:

• You've spotted an opportunity for an AI solution before anyone assigned it to you, and built it, even if it started as a side project or a shortcut nobody asked for. Ask you to name one and it won't take you long.

• What you've shipped has been in production and actually used, not a prototype sitting in a repo or a demo that impressed someone once.

• You can point to at least one thing you built where you had a rough idea of what it was worth before building it, and checked afterward whether it delivered.

Must-haves:

• Hands-on production experience, not purely architectural or supervisory.

• Commercial instinct that precedes technical execution: you know the business case before you write the first line.

• Track record of shipping production AI/software systems that are live and used by real users.

• Solid fluency in LLMs, agentic workflows, and modern AI infrastructure.

• Ability to reason about commercial impact, not just technical correctness.

• Comfortable working with high autonomy and limited process.

• Office-first: on-site in Rotterdam, five days a week.

This role is not for you if you:

• Got into AI because it became an important skill, not because you could not imagine doing anything else.

• Need a brief, a PM, or a defined scope before taking action.

• Measure your output in technical quality or feature count rather than business impact.

• Would answer 'what would you build first?' with an infrastructure question.

• If you think a workweek of 40h is a lot.

• Prefer hybrid or remote working.

What we offer

• Room to grow: opportunities develop fast, within your role and across HelloPrint

• The team: 100+ people from 20+ nationalities who build at a pace most companies cannot match. Rotterdam is not a compromise. It is where the work happens.

• Real impact: shape the future of a high-growth, AI-driven company where your ideas land in production the same week.

• Full autonomy from day one: no roadmap to follow, no brief to wait for. You see the problem, you build the solution, you own the outcome.

• Hello-Benefits: including 24/7 HelloFit gym access, UrbanSportsClub discount, the best events and company-sponsored healthy meals every day

• Base salary: €80,000 to €140,000 gross per year, depending on seniority and experience.

Ready to build something? We need bold thinkers, fast executors, and AI-first problem solvers. If that sounds like you, apply now. Let's redefine an industry together.

At HelloPrint, we believe diversity makes us better. We're building a workplace where everyone can be themselves, grow, and do their best work regardless of background, identity, or perspective. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds.