Founding Head of AI / Chief AI Scientist (m/f/d)

About them 

beyondbots is a dynamic start-up on a mission to redefine enterprise efficiency. They specialize in leveraging integration, automation, and AI to enhance client productivity, resulting in higher employee satisfaction and superior customer experiences.

Since they have successfully built a robust project business across Europe, supporting global enterprises and SMBs with solutions in process automation and AI. Looking ahead, their strategic focus is shifting to launch a cutting-edge supply chain AI platform, purpose-built to automate and optimize operations for enterprises.
 

The mission

At beyondbots they don’t believe in simple LLM wrappers – they are building true, multi-modal AI solutions from the ground up. While their CPTO ensures a robust, scalable backbone, you, as their Founding Head of AI / Chief AI Scientist, are the AI evangelist who creates high business value for their clients with differentiating models and algorithms. As part of the C-Level, you're not just a strategist in the boardroom; you also delve deep into the engine room of the models. You bring the technical breadth to evaluate domains fast, make pragmatic bets, and lead a team of elite AI engineers from rapid prototype to reliable production system. 
 

Your responsibilities

1. AI architecture and hands-on prototyping

• Architect from Scratch: Define their AI stack from the ground up. Make sound, pragmatic "build vs. buy" decisions – knowing exactly when to rely on frontier models via API and when custom fine-tuning of open-weight models provides the crucial competitive edge.
• Bridge AI Domains: Seamlessly connect Generative AI and LLMs with classical Machine/Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Operations Research, and Forecasting. You have enough breadth across domains – whether NLP, voice, time-series, or optimization – to evaluate opportunities fast and go deep where it counts.
• Complex Systems: Design reliable multi-agent systems and advanced RAG pipelines that go far beyond simple vector-search queries. You know which architecture fits the problem – and you know when a simpler solution is the smarter choice.
• From Paper to Code: Identify the latest breakthroughs in AI research and rapidly transform promising papers and repos into production-ready blueprints.

2. AI integration, security and operations

• Production Rigor & LLMOps: Own the journey from R&D to production. Implement rigorous evaluation frameworks (e.g., LLM-as-a-Judge, Ragas) to ensure models operate performantly and with strictly minimized hallucinations.
• Enterprise Security & Privacy: Design AI architectures with enterprise-grade security at their core (VPC deployments, strict tenant isolation).
• The Data Flywheel: Build feedback loops that systematically improve their models based on user interactions while strictly maintaining data privacy.
• Cost Efficiency: Continuously monitor and optimize inference efficiency and compute costs for them and their clients.

3. Technical leadership and team building

• Build and Lead the AI Team: You are joining at the ground floor and will actively shape the team around you – hiring, mentoring, and technically elevating a small group of highly qualified AI engineers. 
• The Undisputed Technical Authority: You lead by example through architecture reviews and pair programming. Your team learns from you daily – not because you tell them to, but because they want to.
• Inspiring Leader: Act as a talent magnet who attracts, inspires, and technically challenges top engineers. You split your time roughly between hands-on engineering and technical leadership – and you're comfortable in both modes.
• Peer of the C-Suite: You work closely with the CPTO and the other founding team members to translate AI opportunities into product strategy and business outcomes.

Requirements:

• Broad AI Track Record: You have successfully delivered across multiple AI domains – whether NLP, voice, forecasting, or optimization – and taken complex ML and LLM systems from research to scalable production. You measure your success by real-world impact, not years of experience.
• Under the Hood Expertise: You don't just wrap APIs using frameworks like LangChain; you deeply understand the underlying neural network architectures (Transformers, Attention mechanisms) and know when to go custom.
• Hands-on AI Engineering: You have deep, practical experience with fine-tuning (PEFT, LoRA) and inference optimization (vLLM, quantization). AI is engineering to you, not magic.
• Backend & MLOps Mastery: Excellent Python/PyTorch skills. Strong backend engineering capabilities (FastAPI, REST, async architectures) combined with a solid understanding of ML infrastructure, vector databases, and CI/CD for Machine Learning.
• Founder Mindset: "Low ego, high commitment." Even as part of the leadership team, you aren't afraid to get your hands dirty and write the code for a new core algorithm yourself. You thrive in ambiguity and see an undefined product space as an opportunity, not a blocker.
• Communication: English business fluency is required. German is a plus.
• Location: Based in their Munich hub (hybrid work possible, with regular on-sites 3–4 times per month).

Optional Requirements:

• A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or a related quantitative field.
• A strong footprint in the Open-Source community (GitHub, HuggingFace, publications, or tech talks).
• Hands-on experience with specialized architectures (e.g., Graph Neural Networks, Deep RL) or low-level optimizations (CUDA, Triton).

This role is NOT for you if:

• You prefer managing managers and budgets over discussing architecture and user flows.
• Your last experience with hands-on coding was during your academic studies.
• You need a fully defined product vision before you can start building.
• Team culture and close collaboration is everything for them – do not apply if you like tech more than people.

What they offer you:

• Founding Member: You are part of the founding team and the C-Suite of beyondbots. You will own the overall technical platform development and product roadmap.
• Shared Victory: Your high-stakes contributions are rewarded with an attractive bonus and employee stock option program (VSOP).
• Validated Use Cases for Product Development: Ready access to concrete, high-impact problems to solve, ensuring product relevance and fast time-to-market. 
• Team Culture: A highly skilled team that enjoys its work and offers a politics- and ego-free zone. 
• Established Brand and Company: A recognized name in the industry with a solid foundation, providing stability and market trust for new product initiatives.
   

Simply apply here.