The Role

As AI Team Lead, you will own the technical leadership of a cross-functional AI squad working on high-priority use cases across the drug development lifecycle. You will set direction for a team of ML Engineers, Data Scientists and AI Platform specialists while staying close to the code.

You will architect LLM and agentic solutions, make key build-vs-buy decisions and take systems into production to the standard a regulated environment demands. You are the bridge between AI research ambition and engineering reality.

What You Will Do

Technical Leadership

• Lead the design and deployment of LLM-based systems, RAG architectures and agentic AI workflows across research and clinical use cases

• Define the team's approach to model selection, prompt engineering, fine-tuning and evaluation

Team & Delivery

• Lead and mentor a team of 4 to 8 AI and ML Engineers, running technical reviews and building a high-performance culture

• Own delivery across the team's roadmap, balancing exploration with production-grade execution

AI in a Regulated Context

• Ensure AI systems align with GxP guidelines, data governance requirements and the EU AI Act

• Implement model monitoring, drift detection and retraining pipelines for high-stakes decision support

• Champion responsible AI: explainability, bias assessment and human-in-the-loop design

Tech Environment

LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude, Llama) | RAG & Vector Search | Agentic Workflows | LangChain / LlamaIndex | Azure OpenAI | Python / PyTorch | MLflow / Kubeflow | Azure / AWS | Docker / Kubernetes

What You Bring

• Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-based systems, RAG pipelines and agentic AI applications in production

• Proven technical leadership: setting architecture direction, reviewing code and mentoring engineers

• Strong Python and MLOps fundamentals (versioning, monitoring, CI/CD)

• Experience in or alongside a regulated industry such as pharma, medtech or financial services

• Confidence presenting to senior non-technical leaders without losing depth with engineers

• Fluent English; German is a plus but not required

Nice to Have

• Life sciences AI use cases such as literature mining, clinical NLP or regulatory document intelligence

• Knowledge of GxP validation frameworks (GAMP5, 21 CFR Part 11, EU Annex 11)

• Experience with knowledge graphs or biomedical ontologies (MeSH, SNOMED, Gene Ontology)

• A track record of taking an AI team from proof of concept to sustained production delivery

Interested?

This is a confidential search managed by AI Futures. Apply directly or message Kyle at kyle@aifutures.group for a confidential conversation.

What we are building

ecoplanet builds the operating system for the energy transition. Our software helps European businesses cut energy costs, run more efficiently, and take the pain out of managing energy day to day. We are around 40 people and backed by EQT Ventures, HV Capital and others.

Why This Role Matters

You lead engineering at ecoplanet: 11 engineers in two squads, including two squad leads.

This is the most senior engineering role in the company. There is no CTO above you. You own the technical direction, not just the delivery of someone else's plan, and you are the engineering voice on the leadership team.

It is also a hands-on job. With a team this size you stay close to the code and the architecture. If you have been away from technical work for a few years, this might not be the right role for you.

What you will own:

• The team. 11 engineers, which includes two engineering managers. Hiring, performance, growth, and keeping good people
• The systems. Our Cockpit SaaS platform, the metering and IoT integration layer, the data platform (time-series ingestion, quality, pipelines), the forecasting and optimization services, and the automation that acts on customer assets
• The technical direction. Architecture, build-vs-buy, and the big platform calls
• Delivery. Quarterly roadmap execution, owned together with Product
• Operations. Reliability, on-call, incidents, security posture, and cloud spend

What You’ll Achieve

• Get the best out of the team you have and grow only where it clearly adds. At 11 people, losing one strong engineer costs more than one extra hire gains. But you should be capable of growing the team substantially if business demands it
• Turn the roadmap into commitments the company can count on. Surface dependencies early, clear blockers, and make the trade-off calls with Product and the founders.
• We expect engineering to care about business and product and we expect you to be an example here
• Set the architecture so it holds as data volume, customer count and the team grow.
• Run incidents properly: fast response, honest postmortems, fixes that stop the same thing happening again
• Keep enough processes to be reliable and no more. A 11-person team should not feel like a 100-person one
• Work closely with Product, Data Science, our energy market experts and other disciplines, so we build against the real physical and regulatory constraints

What Sets You Up for Success

Must have

• 3+ years of experience leading engineering teams before in a product company, including senior engineers or squad leads
• You have done it in a lean team, hands-on, without a layer of managers to delegate to. Some excellent large-company leaders struggle here. There is no layer to hide behind
• You have personally owned delivery predictability and reliability for a production system real customers depend on, and you can tell us what it looked like before and after
• Strong technical judgment in at least two of: cloud and distributed backend / multi-tenant SaaS; high-volume or time-series data pipelines; IoT, device integration and real-time telemetry; ML or optimization in production. Deep enough to earn engineers' trust, make architecture calls and set the technical direction yourself
• You have run hiring and performance for real: you have grown people, and you have also managed people out when that was the right call
• You treat incident management, security and compliance as yours to own, not to delegate
• Clear written and spoken English. German is a strong plus — most of our customers are German Mittelstand

Nice to have

• Energy, industrial, SaaS or a physical-world domain.
• Having been the most senior technical person somewhere before (CTO, VP Engineering, or the person everyone asked).

Not required

• Being the strongest coder on the team. You do need to read the code, make architecture calls, and occasionally build something.
• A “Head of” title already. We look at what you have done, not what it was called.
• 
  

What we are building

ecoplanet builds the operating system for the energy transition. Our software helps European businesses cut energy costs, run more efficiently, and take the pain out of managing energy day to day. We are around 40 people and backed by EQT Ventures, HV Capital and others.

Why This Role Matters

You lead engineering at ecoplanet: 11 engineers in two squads, including two squad leads.

This is the most senior engineering role in the company. There is no CTO above you. You own the technical direction, not just the delivery of someone else's plan, and you are the engineering voice on the leadership team.

It is also a hands-on job. With a team this size you stay close to the code and the architecture. If you have been away from technical work for a few years, this might not be the right role for you.

What you will own:

• The team. 11 engineers, which includes two engineering managers. Hiring, performance, growth, and keeping good people
• The systems. Our Cockpit SaaS platform, the metering and IoT integration layer, the data platform (time-series ingestion, quality, pipelines), the forecasting and optimization services, and the automation that acts on customer assets
• The technical direction. Architecture, build-vs-buy, and the big platform calls
• Delivery. Quarterly roadmap execution, owned together with Product
• Operations. Reliability, on-call, incidents, security posture, and cloud spend

What You’ll Achieve

• Get the best out of the team you have and grow only where it clearly adds. At 11 people, losing one strong engineer costs more than one extra hire gains. But you should be capable of growing the team substantially if business demands it
• Turn the roadmap into commitments the company can count on. Surface dependencies early, clear blockers, and make the trade-off calls with Product and the founders.
• We expect engineering to care about business and product and we expect you to be an example here
• Set the architecture so it holds as data volume, customer count and the team grow.
• Run incidents properly: fast response, honest postmortems, fixes that stop the same thing happening again
• Keep enough processes to be reliable and no more. A 11-person team should not feel like a 100-person one
• Work closely with Product, Data Science, our energy market experts and other disciplines, so we build against the real physical and regulatory constraints

What Sets You Up for Success

Must have

• 3+ years of experience leading engineering teams before in a product company, including senior engineers or squad leads
• You have done it in a lean team, hands-on, without a layer of managers to delegate to. Some excellent large-company leaders struggle here. There is no layer to hide behind
• You have personally owned delivery predictability and reliability for a production system real customers depend on, and you can tell us what it looked like before and after
• Strong technical judgment in at least two of: cloud and distributed backend / multi-tenant SaaS; high-volume or time-series data pipelines; IoT, device integration and real-time telemetry; ML or optimization in production. Deep enough to earn engineers' trust, make architecture calls and set the technical direction yourself
• You have run hiring and performance for real: you have grown people, and you have also managed people out when that was the right call
• You treat incident management, security and compliance as yours to own, not to delegate
• Clear written and spoken English. German is a strong plus — most of our customers are German Mittelstand

Nice to have

• Energy, industrial, SaaS or a physical-world domain.
• Having been the most senior technical person somewhere before (CTO, VP Engineering, or the person everyone asked).

Not required

• Being the strongest coder on the team. You do need to read the code, make architecture calls, and occasionally build something.
• A “Head of” title already. We look at what you have done, not what it was called.
•