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Talent @ Eloquent AI (YC X25) | Founder @ TalentCo | Building elite GTM & Tech teamsTalentCo is delighted to be working with an AI startup looking to hire a high‑calibre Lead AI Engineer into their growing engineering team in Europe, having just closed a significant seed funding round.

This hire can be based remote‑first anywhere in Europe (or the UK), for this London‑headquartered startup.

You will drive the technical evolution of the client’s AI‑first platform and serve as their resident AI/ML expert. You will be a core software engineer architecting the complex systems that make AI useful in production, splitting your time between crafting complex AI processing architectures and hands‑on data/backend engineering, with the rest spent doing whatever is needed to ship.

As Lead AI Engineer you will:

Architect & engineer AI systems: Build robust processing architectures that leverage off‑the‑shelf LLMs, RAG pipelines, and context engineering to solve hard problems, and benchmark these systems rigorously.

Build the backend foundation: Spend significant time in Python (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy) building APIs, data structures, and services that power the product, ensuring the “AI” is delivered on reliable, production‑grade rails.

Close the data loop: Lead the transition from “zero‑shot” implementations to data‑driven optimisation, instrument data collection, design online evaluation metrics, and deploy simple, effective ML models to optimise user outcomes based on real feedback.

Be a full‑stack partner: Jump into the frontend (React/TS) to implement features or debug integrations, ensuring algorithms work in user interactions.

Mentor & lead: Upskill the team on AI concepts and best practices,



helping distinguish between hype and engineering reality.

Strategically advise: Help product and leadership navigate valuable versus possible features, steering the roadmap toward business impact through data‑driven optimisation.

We want to hear from you if you bring:

Production engineering (5+ years): Strong software engineering background, extensive experience building and maintaining backend services in Python (FastAPI or similar async frameworks) deployed to cloud providers or modern platforms.

Applied AI architecture: Built complex applications using Foundation Models / LLMs, understanding context window management, prompting strategies, and chaining models for reliable results.

True ML fundamentals: Background in training and evaluating models (TensorFlow/PyTorch/Keras/Scikit‑learn), knowing when a simple classifier is better than a generative model.

Data fluency: Build datasets from scratch (bootstrapping, crowdsourcing) and evaluate them (cross‑validation, precision/recall, business metrics).

Team‑oriented mindset: Strong communication skills, ability to explain complex ideas to technical and non‑technical audiences, and passion for cross‑functional collaboration.

Passion and pride in shipping: Do‑whatever‑it‑takes attitude to deliver against important business goals.

Pragmatic best practices: Desire to build efficient, scalable, and maintainable code while managing trade‑offs between technical debt and delivery speed.

What do they offer?

Base salary between €120‑160k

Remote‑first with occasional trips to the London HQ to see the team

Apple devices and the best AI tooling

Meaningful early‑stage share opportunities

Seniority level

Mid‑Senior level

Employment type

Full‑time

Job function

Engineering and Information Technology

Software Development

📌 Lead Ai Engineer (Remote In Europe) - €160.000 A Year - Remote (Madrid)
🏢 TalentCo
📍 Madrid