Lead AI Engineer

Location
: Hybrid (Lisbon or Madrid preferred)

About InteractiveAI

InteractiveAI is a fast-growing startup on a mission to empower enterprises with fully managed AI agent lifecycles.

We are building the next generation of enterprise-AI solutions, delivering an end-to-end Agentic IDE alongside an extensible ecosystem of agentic resources and solutions. Our platform allows companies to orchestrate, monitor, evaluate, deploy and improve AI agents—and soon fine-tune and own their own models.

We value autonomy, speed, and innovation, and we're building a world-class team to match. Our squads are lean, focused, and execution-driven.

If you thrive in high-performance environments and want to be part of a company that rewards transformational outcomes, this is for you.

What You'll Do

As a Lead AI Engineer at InteractiveAI, you'll lead experimentation and deployment of cutting-edge models, agentic architectures, and fine-tuning workflows - shaping the core systems that power our autonomous agents. Embedded in a cross-functional squad, you'll design and implement advanced AI systems that integrate reasoning, memory, and tool use to solve real-world business problems. You'll own end-to-end model and data pipelines, support scalable LLM deployments, and contribute to robust, production-grade AI infrastructure.

• Build and maintain scalable pipelines for structured/unstructured data ingestion, transformation, and feature engineering
• Deploy ML models and LLMs into production, ensuring performance, reliability, and traceability
• Build streamlined fine-tuning pipelines for LLMs with versioned checkpoints and hyperparameter tracking
• Implement automated evaluation (A/B tests, LLM-as-judge, validation suites) and dashboards to monitor latency, accuracy, drift, and trigger retraining or alerts
• Feature engineering, imputation, and transformation techniques in practical scenarios
• Implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows and evaluate performance
• Implement enterprise-grade agentic workflows and evaluate LLM outputs
• Optimize inference speed and memory usage in high-throughput systems
• Monitor and improve model performance in production, including latency, accuracy, and drift
• Work alongside product and delivery leads to ensure client-ready, measurable outcomes

What We're Looking For

We're looking for someone with strong foundations, proven delivery, and the ability to build production-ready AI systems. Here's what success looks like for this role:

1/ Minimum Requirements:

• 3+ years
  in data engineering, ML engineering, or applied AI roles
• Experience
  deploying models
  to production and optimizing inference performance
• Hands-on experience with at least one
  agent orchestration tool
  (LangGraph, LlamaIndex)
• Experience
  training deep-learning models and fine-tuning LLMs
• Fluent in Python
  for data and ML development and hands-on experience with
  at least one deep learning framework
  (PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc.)
• Experience building
  data pipelines
  (batch or streaming) using tools like Airflow, Spark
• Solid grasp of
  ML concepts
  (bias-variance tradeoff, supervised vs. unsupervised learning, precision-recall tradeoffs)
• Comfortable working with
  cloud platforms
  (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Strong communication skills and experience working in cross-functional teams

2/ Additional Requirements:

• Experience with LLMs and RAG pipelines in production
• Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, and document retrieval strategies
• Exposure to MLOps practices: monitoring, reproducibility, CI/CD for ML
• Experience optimizing inference latency and cost at scale
• Experience working in regulated or enterprise environments (e.g., banking, insurance)

Who You Are

• Proactive & Resourceful
  : You take initiative to identify gaps and drive solutions without waiting for instructions.
• Accountable & High-Ownership
  : You treat our codebase and infrastructure as your own, and you honor commitments.
• Entrepreneurial Mindset
  : You thrive in ambiguity, embrace rapid change, and deliver in a high-paced startup setting.
• Team Player
  : You collaborate effectively across disciplines, give and receive feedback constructively, and mentor others.

What You'll Get

• Competitive base salary (from €60,000/yr to €120,000/yr) + performance bonuses
• Future equity opportunity for high performers
• Private health insurance
• Flexible work setup + travel when needed (ideally Hybrid in Lisbon or Madrid)
• 25 days of holidays/paid time off (excluding local public holidays)

Interview Process

We keep our process focused and respectful of your time. Most candidates complete it in 2–3 weeks. Here's what to expect:

1. Intro Call
   – 30 minutes with our team to align on fit and expectations
2. Take-Home Challenge
   – A practical task based on real-world problems
3. Technical Interview
   – Deep dive into the challenge, technical experience, and AI engineering
4. Cultural and Values Interview
   – Discussion on motivation, cultural and value alignment
5. Offer
   – Final conversation and offer

We're building a team of builders — people who care about impact, quality, and growth. If that's you, let's talk —