EU remote
Staff AI Engineer - Agentic Shopping
About this role
In a nutshell Build the intelligence that helps households get the week sorted Agentic grocery assistance: Picnic brings together something unusually powerful for an AI builder: a direct customer relationship, a live grocery assortment and the operational system that takes every order from intention to delivery. That gives you the opportunity to build an assistant that does more than talk; it can understand a household’s plans and constraints, assemble a grounded basket, explain its choices and learn from what customers accept or change.
You will decide where models, retrieval, ranking and deterministic services add real value, balancing customer control, correctness, latency, reliability and cost. Technical leadership & vision: As a Staff AI Engineer, you will be the hands-on technical lead for Agentic Shopping. You will own technical direction, architecture and model-strategy decisions; solve the hardest production challenges yourself; and establish evaluation, observability, safety and fallback patterns that other teams can reuse.
Tricks of the trade Build Picnic’s shopping assistant: Lead the technical direction for agentic shopping experiences that help millions of people plan and shop effortlessly. Technical leadership & architecture: Lead the system architecture for multi-turn conversational agents, balancing latency, safety guardrails, and inference costs. Technically mentor engineers across the organization to execute on building production-grade agentic systems.
Rapid prototyping & productionization: Drive a fast-paced, iterative engineering cadence. Build initial prototypes, establish architectural patterns, and write production code when necessary to unblock complex technical challenges. Model fine-tuning & context engineering: Design and implement systems architectures for multi-turn, conversational agents using open-weight models and techniques like fine-tuning, distillation, and RAG.
Evaluation & safety feedback loops: Establish continuous offline and online evaluation for mission completion, basket correctness, customer effort, clarification quality, acceptance and corrections, safety, reliability, latency and cost. Cross-functional alignment: Collaborate with product, design, and product teams to define technical trade-offs, align on agent capabilities, and ensure a seamless, safe user experience.