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AI Platform Engineer

Picnic

Amsterdam
Full-time
5-10 years experience
On-site

Key Skills

Python
FastAPI
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Kubernetes
Docker
AWS
Terraform
PostgreSQL
Kafka
RabbitMQ
OpenSearch
LLM
System Architecture
CI/CD
Observability

Job Description

In a nutshell 

Picnic is building a new generation of intelligent shopping experiences and fulfillment automation with AI. In our app, we help customers search in their own words, plan meals around their household and shop effortlessly. In our supply chain, automation helps us deliver efficiently and sustainably. 

As an AI Platform Engineer, you’ll build the tools and infrastructure to take AI from experiment to dependable production system: model access, tracing, evaluation, fine-tuning and low-latency serving. You'll set the technical direction for how engineers build with AI, working closely with product teams across search, personalisation, and fulfillment automation.

Tricks of the trade

Provide an environment in which agents run at optimal cost: Evolve our AI Gateway with provider integrations, model routing, fallbacks, rate limits, privacy controls, and cost attribution.

Standardise LLM tracing, evals and benchmarking: Build end-to-end tracing, evaluation, and production monitoring across prompts, models, retrieval, tools, and agent state. Help teams turn human judgement and customer outcomes into repeatable evaluation sets.

Productionize open-weight models: Create the path to fine-tune, evaluate and serve open-weight models. Support real-time inference and high-throughput batch workloads, and make latency, performance and cost trade-offs visible.

Build a paved path for getting agents to run in production: Enable developers by providing clear APIs, SDKs, templates and local tooling for structured generation, tool use, model experiments and agent workflows. Make the supported path easier than assembling one-off infrastructure.

Our Tech: You’ll work with Python on a daily basis, using frameworks like FastAPI, LiteLLM, OpenAI, Gemini and more. Supporting this core stack are Snowflake, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Helm, Terraform, Vault, and Datadog. Our open-weight training and serving stack is one of the choices you'll help us make.

We’re looking for

  • Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, AI or a related field
  • Strong backend engineering fundamentals, especially in Python
  • Proven track record building self-service AI platforms and scaling their adoption
  • Experience bringing language models or other ML/AI systems into production with meaningful reliability, latency, security, and cost requirements
  • Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD and observability
  • Able to take end-to-end ownership, make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions and work effectively across platform, ML/AI and product teams

+ Bonus points!

  • Experience with LLM or agent gateways, tool protocols such as MCP, guardrails or policy-aware model access
  • Experience with LLM fine-tuning and serving

Picnic Perks 

🫱🏼‍🫲🏾 Teamwork makes the dream work

With more than 80 nationalities across 3 countries, you’ll be part of a diverse company with plenty of cool stuff to get involved with, from board game evenings to after-work drinks to our company ski trip and more!

💡 Make a difference

You’ll work in an awesome startup environment with the freedom to drive your own projects and create a visible impact. Our fully electric vehicles and sustainable business model mean you’ll also be contributing to making the world a better place! 

🥗 Fresh Lunch, coffee, and snacks 

Our offices are equipped with fully-fledged coffee bars and a kitchen and chefs. They prepare delicious fresh and warm lunches every day so you can keep your energy up.

🚲 Health insurance discount & bike plan

We have a partnership with CZ (a health insurance provider). Picnic employees get a discount on CZ insurance packages between 5% and 15%. Furthermore, through our partnership with Lease a Bike, you can rent-to-own a new (e)bike at a discounted rate

🌎 Relocation

If you’re moving from another country to join Picnic we make it as smooth as possible for you. We’ll cover your flight costs for you and your partner and kids, your first month's rent and moving costs (up to €2000), and help you with the 30% tax ruling setup and application. 

📆 All the rest 

At Picnic you get 25 holidays, we cover your travel expenses and offer a pension plan. And your phone and laptop are on us, as well. 

Core Responsibilities

You will build and maintain the infrastructure required to transition AI models from experimental phases to dependable production systems. This includes managing model access, tracing, evaluation, fine-tuning, and high-throughput serving.

Requirements

Candidates must have a Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or AI and strong backend engineering fundamentals with Python. Proven experience in scaling self-service AI platforms and deploying ML systems with high reliability and performance requirements is essential.

Benefits

  • Health insurance discount
  • Bike plan
  • Relocation support
  • Pension plan
  • Paid holidays
  • Company laptop
  • Company phone
  • Fresh lunch
  • Coffee and snacks
  • Team events

About Picnic

Industry: Retail

Company size: 5,001-10,000 employees

At Picnic, we’re a team of inventors, builders, dreamers, and best-in-class operators! With our app-only business model and custom-built in-house supply chain, we're revolutionizing the way people buy groceries and eat every day. We're growing across the Netherlands, Germany, France, and beyond. One of the things that makes Picnic different is that we handle almost everything ourselves: from forecasting and building automated warehouses to designing custom electric vehicles and writing our own software. It gives us total freedom to experiment with bold, new ideas (which we do a lot!). We love to challenge ourselves and learn by doing. The best way to grow here? By taking ownership from day one and pushing boundaries every single day. As a diverse team of over 85 nationalities, there’s always something happening - whether you’re into sports, board games, charity work, dancing at our legendary Picnic festival, or licorice tasting (yes, really!). Our scale-up culture means you get to own your work and bring fresh ideas to life. If you’re looking to make a real impact, reach out. We’d love to hear from you!

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