Lead AI Engineer

Description

We're an independent European digital product studio with a strong track record of delivering market-defining strategies and products for enterprises and governments. With about 200 talented people across three countries, premium AI capabilities and a diverse portfolio of international clients, we define, design and ship high-quality digital products, strategies and software. From global cloud-based platforms and large-scale apps to medical devices, banking software and augmented reality experiences. In a nutshell: if it lives and breathes digital, it’s what we do best.

Become a part of our team

We're looking for a Lead AI Engineer to lead our AI engineering practice and remain involved in AI engineering projects. As the leader of our AI engineering practice, you'll be responsible for our AI engineering vision, our AI engineering standards, knowledge sharing and expertise building. You'll work closely together with the leads of our other practices to help shape the wider picture, or tackle cross-cutting challenges.

As a seasoned AI engineer, you lead by example and you're not afraid to take on the hardest technical challenges yourself. You understand the importance of keeping touch with the actual engineering work taking place: you're a lead engineer, not a manager.

Responsibilities

• Lead the practice
• Own the AI Engineering practice: its vision, craft, standards, best practices, tooling and reference architectures. You provide a clear vision, set goals & priorities, guide expertise building and nurture a culture of sharing knowledge.
• Keep role expectations and descriptions in line with the role's evolution: job descriptions should reflect reality, expectation in our Career Development Framework should be accurate, and learning paths should be available to guide people through change or enable growth paths.
• Organise the AI Engineering practice so that it operates smoothly.
• Represent the AI Engineering practice in our Engineering Council, and manage cross-practice collaboration.
• Shape tomorrow's AI products
• Design and build AI-powered features on top of foundation models: agents, multimodal retrieval systems, assistants, document analysis, advanced search capabilities, and more.
• Guide AI solutions from early experiments and prototypes to production deployment, integrating them into existing applications, workflows, and enterprise systems.
• Design and implement agentic workflows, tool integrations, and context management systems that allow AI to interact reliably with the world around it.
• Build evaluation into your work from the start. Define success criteria, measure performance, investigate failures, and continuously improve the quality of your solutions.
• Make AI systems production-ready, with attention to reliability, observability, latency, scalability, security, and cost.
• Make thoughtful engineering decisions about orchestration, model selection, context management, and human oversight. Know when AI adds value and when conventional software is the better choice.
• Work directly with clients and end-users to define evaluation criteria, support user testing, capture feedback, and translate insights into improvements that make AI solutions more effective and reliable.

Requirements

• A senior engineer with a proven track record in the field of AI engineering:
• You have a broad domain knowledge, covering different types of models, standards, protocols, common architectural patterns and typical risks or pitfalls.
• As a senior AI engineer, you're well aware of common software engineering principles and best practices, and you apply them in your everyday work.
• You have experience building and shipping agentic solutions. You're familiar with the most common LLM models, you know what they can do or when they can break. You're strong in prompt, context and harness engineering.
• You're a proven engineering leader, or you can convince us that you're the real deal. We expect you to be able to articulate a clear vision, be able to sell it and know how to execute it.
• You have strong communications skills, and you're fluent in English.
• Proficiency in Dutch or French is a strong asset.

Benefits

• Joining In The Pocket means becoming part of a team that shapes the future of our clients’ businesses across Europe. Here’s what you can look forward to:
• You’ll start with a permanent contract in a role that comes with responsibility and the opportunity to make a real impact from day one.
• We offer a competitive salary that reflects your experience and the value you bring.
• Our benefits package has you covered with hospitalisation and group insurance, meal vouchers, a phone subscription, and more.
• You’ll have a mobility budget that lets you decide how to get around, your way.
• Life at In The Pocket isn’t just about work, we host team events throughout the year to celebrate, connect, and have fun together.
• Learning never stops here, so after six months, you’ll receive a dedicated learning and development budget to keep growing your skills and exploring new horizons.