AI Engineer (m/f/x) - Focus: Software Engineering Heilbronn Heilbronn

The appliedAI Initiative elevates Europe’s industry to become shapers in the age of AI, creating a future that we desire to live in. Through our ecosystem of strong partners, comprehensive programs, services and solutions we advance companies holistically on their AI journey. With our uniquely diverse, interdisciplinary, and driven team, we build on deep technical expertise while specializing on applicability of the solutions. We share a mindset of collaboration and openness with our ecosystem of leading companies and tech players. Our common goal is to strengthen the European landscape, jointly creating unique knowledge for applying trustworthy AI. We believe that AI Agents will be the dominant topic for AI in the near future and that appliedAI with its partner ecosystem will impact how this technology is being used in industry and beyond in Europe.

Your mission

As an AI Engineer in the Professional Services organization, you will apply AI in real-world settings and take solutions from proof of concept to production rollout across our customers’ organizations. This is an engineering role with a clear focus on software engineering: scalable services, robust APIs, reliable pipelines, and operational excellence—beyond notebooks and prototypes.

• Design, build, and operate production-grade AI features and services end to end.
• Implement clean, testable software integrating ML/LLM components (APIs, microservices, event-driven systems).
• Develop reliable data/feature pipelines; enforce data quality, lineage, and reproducibility.
• Productionize models with strong evaluation, safety, and observability practices.
• Optimize for reliability, latency, throughput, and cost; instrument metrics, logs, and tracing.
• Collaborate closely with AI strategists and program managers to deliver measurable impact for customers.
• Contribute to pre-sales by providing technical input for scoping, effort estimates, and solution options.
• Guide partner teams from PoC to scalable, maintainable solutions deployed in production.
• Explicit focus: robust, end-to-end enterprise solutions.

Your profile

• STEM degree (preferably Computer Science or Engineering).
• 2–5+ years in a comparable engineering role.
• Strong experience in Python; solid grasp of software design and professional engineering workflows (Git, testing, code review, CI/CD).
• Experience delivering machine learning projects in production or near-production settings.
• Foundational knowledge in statistics and machine learning; experience with ML/LLM integration a plus.
• Understanding of cloud-native development (Docker, Kubernetes), APIs/microservices, and data stores.
• You thrive in high-performing teams and have the drive to learn, improve, and contribute to appliedAI.
• Excellent technical, analytical, and problem-solving skills; clear communication with customers and teammates.
• Fluent English, ideally fluent German.

What we offer

A highly qualified and motivated team of ~90 people on a journey to change the rapidly evolving European AI Landscape.

• Experience the best of both worlds with our hybrid work model: You can choose to work from our vibrant offices—either at the IPAI in Heilbronn or the House of Communication in Munich—while also enjoying the flexibility to work remotely a few days each week.
• Opportunity to shape a variety of projects and the development of new, original content based on the latest developments in AI and its adoption in businesses.
• An atmosphere that encourages you to think and experiment in new ways with software, hardware, and processes.
• Hottest topics of the next decade and freedom and trust to initiate own activities.
• A highly visible initiative that helps you build a large and high-level network of start-ups, partners, and tech companies.
• Sports membership with Wellpass to access thousands of sports facilities all over Germany (and beyond).
• JobRad leasing option.
• You can take a sabbatical of up to 3 months after 3 years of employment—because sometimes 30 vacation days are not enough to explore the beauty of this world.

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