Tech Lead: AI & Innovation

↳ Alternative locations: Barcelona, Frankfurt a.M., Leipzig, Sevilla Vicoland gives the professional services market a new dimension: Virtual Companies – "Vicos". We invented Vicos as a new type of supplier, more efficient than traditional professional services firms (consultancies, system integrators, agencies etc.). We have received 20 million € in round A financing. Vicos may consist of freelancers, SMEs and AI agents. They organize through our AI-driven SaaS platform to act like real companies, competing successfully for large enterprise projects, e g. ERP introductions or AI transformations. Vicos have proven to be more cost-efficient and to deliver better quality than traditional companies. Already, 120+ Vicos with thousands of freelancers work on projects for enterprise clients like BASF, Miele, Siemens or Daimler and many SME. Forbes and Forrester have named Vicoland as a leading force transforming the market. Our certified platform is key to our success. It provides the full digital infrastructure which makes Vicos come true as a new form to organize human labor and human-agentic interaction. It covers end-to-end all essential areas: marketing, finance, legal, and organization. Given its ambitious and transformative purpose, our platform is highly complex (though easy use). Developing it further takes engineers who combine technical excellence, pragmatic judgement and entrepreneurial spirit. The Tech Lead: AI Innovation we are looking for embodies these qualities in his or her leadership. He or she is up for making a major contribution to our company and to our society. Tasks As the most senior engineer, you'll lead, grow and enable a small team of (forward deployed) engineers: hire, onboard, coach and make every engineer successful in their role. Own the technical direction and technology decisions for Vicoland. Set the architecture across the stack, from frontend to infrastructure, and make sure what we build is scalable, robust and maintainable. Stay hands-on: contribute code yourself, build prototypes, and use AI to aggressively ship high-quality software alongside your team. Translate business needs into technical roadmaps in close cooperation with Business Development, Product and other stakeholders. Prioritize, scope and make trade-offs explicit. Own delivery end-to-end for your team: design, development, QA, deployment and production monitoring, with clear engineering standards and quality gates. Establish how we build with AI: best practices for context engineering, model selection, evaluation, tracing and observability, so that quality is measured, not assumed. Run architectural discussions, code reviews and retrospectives; create a culture of ownership, constructive challenge and continuous learning. Act as a sparring partner to the Chief Product Officer and the leadership team on technology strategy, build-vs-buy decisions and team setup. Requirements Have proven people leadership experience: you have led an engineering team (ideally 3+ engineers), including hiring, performance conversations, career development and coaching. Have excelled somewhere, somehow through an impactful technical contribution, one which we can talk about, and still enjoy writing code yourself. Have deep hands-on experience across the stack (frontend, backend, data, infrastructure/cloud) and a track record of architecting and shipping production-grade software, preferably with AI components (LLMs, embeddings, RAG pipelines, autonomous agents, PyTorch/TensorFlow). Have experience developing AI agents and integrating them into business workflows. Be on top of the latest tools, models and trends in AI-assisted software engineering. You are excellent at context engineering (incl. prompting), know when to leverage which model, and have first-hand experience with Claude Code or Cursor, and you know how to roll these practices out across a team. Know how to evaluate what gets built. You can d