Tech Lead - AI & Innovation (m/f/d)

• You will lead, grow and enable a team of (forward deployed) engineers: make every engineer successful in their role and hire new ones who strengthen the team.
• You will be the only (and main) tech lead for the engineering team, with carreer option to progress to CTO
• 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 features yourself end-2-end by understanding business needs, coding, building prototypes, and for all that using 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.
• Makre sure each team member can work end-to-end: concept & design, development, QA, deployment and production monitoring, with clear engineering standards and quality gates.
• Continuously improve 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 business 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 evaluations, career development and coaching.
• Have excelled somewhere 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 design eval sets, work with LLM-as-judge or ground-truth data, use tracing and observability tooling to find and fix regressions, and make evaluation a team habit.
• Practice a truly agnostic approach to stack and tools: you pick the right tech for the problem, not vice versa, and can explain your choices to both engineers and business stakeholders.
• Balance autonomy and alignment: you drive your team from idea to finished product independently, while knowing when to involve, align with or escalate to others.
• Have the ability to thoughtfully challenge ideas and drive constructive discussions with users, engineers, product, and business leadership.
• Lead with humility: you create psychological safety, give and receive honest feedback, and measure your success by the success of your team.
• Reside within ±3 hours of Central European Time (to enable effective collaboration), at best in one of our office locations in Barcelona, Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Sevilla.
• Full professional proficiency in English at C2 level.
• Full professional proficiency in German at C1 level.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience building or scaling an engineering team in a startup or scale-up environment.
• Prior experience integrating AI into SaaS business workflows, ideally in a client-facing or forward-deployed setup.
• Familiarity with the modern AI-tooling ecosystem (agents, memory systems, vector databases, orchestration frameworks).
• Experience working with distributed or multi-location teams.

Benefits

• Alternative locations: Barcelona, Frankfurt a.M., Leipzig, Sevilla
• You’ll work in an international, closely knit team of high‑performers and entrepreneurial spirits.
• Remote‑friendly + flexible work hours.
• Excellent compensation + participation in the company through our ESOP.
• Growth mindset: Hard skills are important — but mindset matters more. If you meet most of the requirements and you’re hungry to learn, apply anyway.
• If you’re a high‑impact tech lead who thrives on autonomy, drives real results, and is passionate about applying AI to change how teams work - let’s talk. Even if you don’t check every bullet above, but you bring exceptional drive, creativity, and a growth mindset, please apply. We believe the right mindset counts more than checkboxes.