Staff AI Engineer - Agentic Shopping

Amsterdam, Netherlands

About Picnic

Building the supermarket on wheels

Started in 2015 in the Netherlands, Picnic now delivers groceries to millions across three countries, growing fast. The idea? We’re bringing back the milkman. Imagine personal service and fresh products but in a modern, sustainable way. We’re looking for bright minds to shape the future of grocery shopping with us. Ready to join the revolution?

Tech at Picnic

At Picnic we merge advanced technology with a customer-centric approach. We aim to create a simple, affordable, and enjoyable grocery shopping experience. Work on various aspects like our mobile app, store backend, internal development platforms, delivery routing, warehouse logistics, and ML models – all built in-house. We’re looking for problem-solvers who thrive in a collaborative environment. We are open to junior and experienced software, data and ML engineers. Our diverse team welcomes innovative and bold ideas.

Picnic perks

1. With a diverse team of over 80 nationalities, you’re sure to find your people
2. You’ll work in an awesome scaleup environment with the freedom to drive your own projects and create a visible impact
3. We offer a well rounded relocation package to help you make your new step

“At Picnic, we build the technology that powers the transition towards a sustainable food supply chain where we delight customers with more choice, fresher products, and less waste. The team behind this innovation loves to crack hard problems, uses data to explore unbeaten paths, and strives to stay ahead of the curve in this fast-paced industry.”

– Daniel Gebler, CTO

Position

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.

Your qualification

• Proven track record of taking complex multi-turn conversational AI systems from architectural design to high-scale production.
• Experience training, fine-tuning, and optimizing open-weight LLMs for production deployment.
• Hands-on expertise building production RAG systems, context management, and state handling for multi-turn dialogues.
• Experience designing robust evaluation loops, continuous monitoring systems, and automated safety/guardrail mechanisms for customer-facing applications.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction, perform design reviews, and mentor engineering teams without relying on hierarchy.
• Strong Python skills and demonstrated ability to choose and productionize appropriate model, orchestration, retrieval, evaluation and inference tooling. Experience with tools such as PyTorch, LangGraph, vLLM, Pydantic AI, Qdrant or DeepEval is useful, or similar framework tools is required.

Will be a plus

• Experience taking retrieval, ranking or recommendation models from problem definition to measurable production impact
• In-depth expertise in deep learning for sequence modelling, representation learning, or retrieval and ranking
• A degree in Computer Science, AI (or a related field), a PhD, open-source contributions, or peer-reviewed research are considered strong pluses

What we offer

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.

Additional details

A bit about us

When you join Picnic, you’re joining the shopping revolution, delivering groceries to millions of people across Europe, and we’re growing fast. Think super fresh products and personal service, but in a modern, sustainable way. The tech team at Picnic is at the core of Picnic. From deep learning models to forecast orders to delivery algorithms to warehouse logistics: we’ve built it all from the ground up. You’ll thrive here if you’re a problem solver with a pro-active mindset who’s not afraid to be challenged daily.