Expert AI Engineer

Ciklum is looking for an Expert AI Engineer to join our team full-time in Romania.

We are a custom product engineering company that supports both multinational organizations and scaling startups to solve their most complex business challenges. With a global team of over 4,000 highly skilled developers, consultants, analysts and product owners, we engineer technology that redefines industries and shapes the way people live.

As an Expert AI Engineer, become a part of a cross-functional development team engineering experiences of tomorrow.

• Lead the design, development and deployment of advanced AI systems across Data Science and AI Engineering domains
• Architect and implement scalable AI pipelines and LLM-driven applications, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), orchestration and multi-agent systems
• Serve as the technical authority during client engagements, ensuring architecture quality, scalability, performance and reliability
• Contribute hands‑on to development activities, from experimentation and prototyping to production‑grade implementation
• Collaborate with cross‑functional engineering, data, and product teams to align technical solutions with client and business objectives
• Apply MLOps and LLMOps best practices for CI/CD, observability, evaluation and continuous improvement of AI models and pipelines
• Integrate AI services with enterprise platforms (e.g., Confluence, Jira, Git Hub, CRM, ERP) and ensure seamless interoperability
• Drive innovation through internal frameworks and accelerators
• Ensure all AI solutions comply with security, data privacy and responsible‑AI standards
• Mentor engineering peers and support knowledge sharing across teams and practices (e.g., contributing to Ciklum’s AI Academy)
• Act as technical SME in presales conversations, translating business challenges into viable AI engineering solutions
• Partner with delivery and account teams to shape long‑term client engagement strategies based on engineering excellence

• Support recruitment efforts through technical assessments, interviews, and candidate evaluation
• Mentor team members and contribute to cross‑skilling initiatives within the AI and Engineering service lines
• Uphold engineering excellence by promoting best practices, code quality, and delivery standards across projects

We know that sometimes, you can’t tick every box. We would still love to hear from you if you think you’re a good fit!

• 8+ years of professional experience in software, data, or AI engineering, including at least 3–4 years of hands‑on experience designing and implementing AI/ML solutions
• BSc, MSc, or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related quantitative field
• Deep understanding of probability, statistics, and the mathematical foundations of machine learning and optimization
• Proven experience building and deploying advanced AI systems, including Large Language Models (LLMs), multimodal, and generative AI architectures
• Exposure to agentic system design, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and prompt engineering techniques
• Strong proficiency in Python and common AI/ML development frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Tensor Flow, Lang Chain, Hugging Face or equivalent)
• Solid understanding of modern AI engineering practices, including model lifecycle management, observability, evaluation, versioning and continuous improvement
• Familiarity with AI solution delivery methodologies (e.g., CRISP-ML(Q), TDSP or modern agile ML life cycles)
• Ability to visualize, interpret, and communicate model outputs and insights effectively using modern tools and dashboards

• Proven experience in architecting and implementing end‑to‑end AI/ML solutions — from data ingestion and model training to deployment, monitoring and optimization
• Strong software engineering skills for AI system development, including data processing, API integration, and model serving (Python, SQL and optionally Java/Scala or similar)
• Hands‑on experience with cloud‑native AI platforms and services (AWS Sage Maker, Azure ML, GCP Vertex AI or NVIDIA AI…