{"id":3082220,"url":"https://alion.io/job/nejo-tech-lead-ai-engineering-mwd","title":"Tech Lead AI Engineering (m/w/d)","company":{"id":720381,"name":"Nejo","domain":"nejo.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/nejo","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":true,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Join","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Cologne, Germany"],"countries":["DE"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":60000,"max":null,"currency":"EUR","period":"year","gross":true,"usd_annual":67351},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Anthropic","optional":false},{"name":"Arize Phoenix","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Braintrust","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"Hybrid Search","optional":false},{"name":"Langfuse","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Next.js","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"OCR","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false},{"name":"pgvector","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Caching","optional":false},{"name":"Promptfoo","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Reranking","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Vercel AI SDK","optional":false},{"name":"Zod","optional":false},{"name":"Azure DevOps","optional":true},{"name":"Claude","optional":true},{"name":"GDPR","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":true},{"name":"Mastra","optional":true},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI Agents SDK","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true}],"status":"closed","first_seen_at":"2026-10-22T09:52:46Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-22","last_verified_at":"2026-10-26T00:45:02Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":"2026-10-26T00:45:02Z","days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"description":"For a young company in the rapidly growing AI implementation market, we are looking for a Tech Lead, starting as soon as possible, ideally in early November. The company runs LLM-based systems in production: content generation pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) on internal documents, and automated workflows closely integrated with their business systems. The entire stack is built on TypeScript and Next.js.\nThese systems are already live. As Tech Lead, you take ownership of them, increase their reliability and quality, and expand them to new use cases, while being technically responsible for a team. The role brings together applied LLM engineering and solid backend engineering in TypeScript. Training or fine-tuning foundation models is not part of the job.\nStack: TypeScript, Next.js, Node.js, Postgres with pgvector, Docker, Azure, Anthropic and OpenAI APIs, Vercel AI SDK.\nWhat you’ll do\nTechnical responsibility for the team, including architecture decisions and code reviews\n\nTechnical guidance for the team and point of contact for non-technical colleagues\n\nTake over and maintain the existing LLM pipelines: review the current architecture, identify failure modes, prioritise fixes, and refactor and extend the systems without disrupting production\n\nOwn the RAG systems from end to end: document ingestion and parsing, chunking, indexing, hybrid retrieval (BM25 and vector), query rewriting, reranking and grounded generation with citations\n\nImplement and maintain chunk-level access control, index freshness and tenant isolation across all retrieval systems\n\nDevelop content generation pipelines that deliver consistent quality at scale, including human review steps\n\nBuild and run automated workflows against internal and third-party business systems (ERP, CRM, email, internal APIs), with durable and idempotent execution, retry and dead-letter handling, and approval steps for irreversible actions\n\nSet up an evaluation framework for systems that currently run without one: golden datasets based on real production failures, retrieval metrics and more\n\nImplement observability along the entire request path\n\nOptimise cost and latency through prompt caching, batching, model routing and smaller models where it makes sense\n\nIdentify where deterministic logic is the better choice and implement it accordingly\n\nWork directly with non-technical colleagues to define and validate automated processes\n\nWhat you bring\nProfessional experience with at least one LLM-based system in production, including responsibility for its operation and incident handling\n\nAdvanced TypeScript and Node.js skills: strict typing of non-deterministic model output, async and concurrency patterns, streaming responses, structured error handling\n\nProduction experience with Next.js: App Router, route handlers, server actions, streaming to the client\n\nProven track record of taking over and improving existing codebases under production traffic\n\nHands-on retrieval expertise: hybrid search, choosing embedding models, cross-encoder reranking, metadata filtering, permission-aware retrieval and structured diagnosis of poor retrieval quality\n\nExperience working with real-world documents: PDFs with tables, scanned material, DOCX, HTML, including layout-aware parsing, OCR and evidence-based chunking\n\nStructured outputs and tool calling are part of your daily work: JSON Schema, Zod or similar runtime validation, function calling, handling malformed or partial output, context window management\n\nExperience designing and running LLM evaluations\n\nExperience with LLM tracing and evaluation tools in a TypeScript codebase (e.g. Braintrust, Langfuse, Promptfoo, OpenTelemetry or Arize Phoenix)\n\nFamiliarity with Postgres including vector search (pgvector or a comparable vector store), Docker, Git, CI/CD and at least one major cloud platform\n\nPractical experience with the Anthropic and/or OpenAI TypeScript SDKs\n\nConfident communication in English, German is a plus\n\nNice to have\nDurable workflow execution for long-running, unattended processes (Temporal, Inngest or similar)\n\nAgent orchestration in production, tool calling, recovery, multi-step workflows (Vercel AI SDK, LangGraph, Mastra, Claude Agent SDK, MCP TypeScript SDK)\n\nExperience integrating enterprise systems such as ERP or CRM platforms like SAP\n\nSecurity and data protection in LLM systems, defences against prompt injection and data exfiltration, PII handling, GDPR-compliant design, EU-hosted or self-hosted inference\n\nStructured or graph-based retrieval for entity-heavy dataexperience\n\nMigrating live pipelines to a new model, embedding model or index without loss of quality\n\nAzure DevOps, Pipelines, Repos and Boards\n\nBenefits\nHybrid setup with 2 office days per week in a bright office in Cologne’s Belgian Quarter (with two balconies and the best view of the city ;))\n\nAI implementation, the growth market of the coming years\n\nTrust-based working hours with compensation for overtime\n\nLots of creative freedom and space for your own ideas\n\nContinuous professional, strategic and technological development\n\nAn open feedback culture, transparent communication and short decision-making paths\n\nRegular team events and workations\n\nSalary from €60,000 gross per year, with room for more depending on experience\n\nThe company is an international team and is actively committed to an inclusive workplace. Applications from people of every gender and identity are welcome, regardless of origin, age, religion, sexual orientation or disability. As women remain underrepresented in tech, women are especially encouraged to apply.\nWe look forward to receiving your application!","description_format":"text","description_chars":5646,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"German","level":"Upper-Intermediate (B2)","optional":true},{"language":"English","level":"Upper-Intermediate (B2)","optional":false}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Germany","iso":"DE","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Job Boards & Aggregators"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-22T12:31:47Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-26T00:45:02Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":null,"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":67351,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/nejo-tech-lead-ai-engineering-mwd","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/nejo-tech-lead-ai-engineering-mwd.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-26T05:47:43Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":7711,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-27T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":720381},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=720381"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fnejo-tech-lead-ai-engineering-mwd"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fnejo-tech-lead-ai-engineering-mwd"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fnejo-tech-lead-ai-engineering-mwd"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/nejo-tech-lead-ai-engineering-mwd\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fnejo-tech-lead-ai-engineering-mwd"}]}