Principal 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 a Principal AI Engineer in Professional Services, you set the technical bar and lead the delivery of mission-critical AI solutions at enterprise scale. You define engineering standards, de-risk complex programs, and remain hands‑on where it matters most. The focus is software engineering and heavy‑duty enterprise solutions.

Your responsibilities

• Own end‑to‑end technical strategy for complex engagements; ensure architectural coherence, quality, and operational excellence; delivery for critical AI programs, making key decisions on frameworks, tools, and technical patterns to deliver high‑quality, production‑ready software and systems
• Design, review, and harden services integrating ML/LLM components with strict SLOs, security guardrails, and observability. Proactively experiment with and integrate state‑of‑the‑art AI technologies (such as agent frameworks, RAG architectures, and cloud‑native solutions) to continuously improve performance and reliability
• Scale solutions from PoC to multi‑tenant, production deployments; drive cost, latency, and reliability optimizations
• Create and maintain reusable accelerators, templates, and reference implementations to speed up delivery across clients
• Partner with customers, strategists, and PMs in pre‑sales and delivery (workshops, solution options, estimations, and statements of work)
• Mentor and coach engineers; uplift engineering practices, testing rigor, CI/CD, and documentation standards across teams
• Provide technical leadership for large customer engagements with measurable outcomes

Your profile

• STEM degree (preferably Computer Science or Engineering)
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including shipping and operating production systems with AI/LLM components
• Expert Python skills and proficiency in at least two additional languages (e.g., C, C++, Go, Java, or TypeScript/Node.js)
• Deep experience with APIs/microservices, event‑driven systems, Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD, and at least two major clouds.
• Proven track record owning SLOs/SLAs, observability, cost/performance optimization, and incident management
• Strong ML/LLM integration experience (serving, retrieval/RAG, evaluation) and applied security/safety guardrails
• Proven experience technically leading projects and large customer engagements with measurable outcomes
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and documentation skills
• Fluent English, ideally fluent in 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 thinking and experimenting 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 that provides 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.