Senior AI Engineer - SDLC (All genders)

With over 25 years’ experience, plus the same enormous passion and ambition we had on day-one, we’re trailblazers in the pet e-commerce industry. Our solutions make over 12 million customers genuinely happier – and that’s something we really care about. We work together to continually adapt; embracing change and the challenges it brings so that we can keep doing better. Join us and discover a place where your potential meets your passion for pets. That’s the power of plus.

We are looking for a Senior Agentic AI Engineer to shape and scale AI-powered engineering capabilities across shopping area of zooplus. This role combines deep hands-on engineering with technical leadership, driving the adoption of AI-enabled development practices and agentic systems across business-critical platforms.

You will help define how AI is embedded into engineering workflows and production systems, ensuring scalable, secure, and measurable impact across teams.

What You’ll Do

• Lead architecture and delivery of AI and agentic platforms across engineering and commerce systems
• Define production-ready patterns for agentic systems, including planning, memory, recovery, and safety mechanisms
• Drive AI-powered SDLC initiatives across coding, testing, review, and release intelligence
• Build reusable MCP-based capability layers for scalable AI adoption across teams
• Own context engineering practices including grounding, retrieval, memory, and evaluation
• Establish observability, governance, and guardrails for LLM integrations
• Collaborate across engineering, product, platform, security, and data teams
• Act as technical lead for complex initiatives and critical design decisions

What You Bring

• 5+ years of software engineering experience in distributed systems
• Strong experience with microservices and event-driven architectures
• Tech-agnostic mindset with strong programming experience in one or more of the following languages: Java, Python, JavaScript, or Kotlin, or broad working knowledge across multiple of these languages.
• Production experience with LLM integrations (Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Bedrock)
• Strong understanding of RAG systems, embeddings, retrieval, and vector databases
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines
• Proven technical leadership across teams

Nice to Have

• Experience with LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, CrewAI, or Semantic Kernel
• Exposure to experimentation and feature flag platforms
• Strong understanding of AI security, privacy, and cost optimisation
• Experience in retail, commerce, or high-scale consumer platforms

Why This Role Matters

This role will help shape how zooplus moves AI from experimentation into reliable production systems that improve engineering velocity and business outcomes.

Headquartered in Munich, with offices across Madrid, Krakow, Wroclaw, London and Vienna, we collaborate because we genuinely love working together - so you’ll be at the heart of an incredible, multinational team. We trust each other to get the job done, which means you’ll benefit from hybrid working, spending 60% of your time in the office and 40% at home. There’s an option to work for 20 days abroad in approved countries too.

Add to that development opportunities that help you to shape your own career path, excellent training and support, wellbeing offers, subsidised transport or bike leasing, plus 20% discount across all our products, and you’ll begin to get a sense of what sets us apart. Find out more about the specific benefits at your local office in our blog posts.

A note on compensation: We believe in being transparent about salary ranges. The range shown reflects the full scope that the role can grow into over time, depending on experience, skills, and impact. Most offers are positioned around the midpoint of the range, ensuring a fair and consistent approach across our teams.

At zooplus, we believe in equal opportunity and support everyone to fulfil their potential. We recognise the power of listening and learning from each other and embrace diversity and inclusion of all.

#LI-Hybrid