Staff Machine Learning Engineer (m/f/d)

About octonomy   
At octonomy, we’re not a typical AI startup. We’re building big — backed by one of Europe’s largest seed rounds (€20M) to scale our vision fast and sustainably. Our mission is clear: we transform companies with the most intelligent digital workforce, enabling a new era of growth.
Our AI octo-Workers automate business processes with high reliability, strong security, and zero hallucinations. Leading customers already trust us — and we’re growing rapidly across Germany and internationally.

Your Role
As Senior Machine Learning Engineer (m/f/d), you will design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems at the intersection of machine learning, large language models, and agentic workflows. This is a highly hands-on role where you take ownership of real-world AI applications and contribute to building scalable, reliable systems that deliver measurable value.
What makes this role unique: we are not building generic RAG pipelines or standard AI features. We are creating a complex knowledge platform designed for industrial and business-critical environments, where accuracy, reliability, and robustness are non-negotiable.

• Build production-grade AI systems: Design, develop, and deploy robust ML- and LLM-based solutions for business-critical automation use cases.
• Shape next-generation AI systems: Work on complex knowledge systems that go far beyond standard RAG setups, with a strong focus on correctness, grounding, and reliability.
• Contribute to system architecture: Collaborate with senior engineers to design scalable architectures across LLM orchestration, retrieval systems, and agentic workflows.
• Bridge research and production: Be part of a team that doesn’t just apply existing solutions, but actively explores and develops new approaches to unsolved problems — and brings them into production.
• Ensure quality and reliability: Implement evaluation frameworks, monitoring, and guardrails to ensure consistent system performance in real-world environments.
• Collaborate across teams: Partner with product, engineering, and other stakeholders to deliver impactful AI solutions.

Your Profile

• Strong AI/ML experience: You have solid experience building and deploying ML systems in production environments.
• LLM expertise: You have hands-on experience with large language models, RAG pipelines, or orchestration frameworks.
• Strong engineering skills: You are highly proficient in Python and modern ML tooling, and you write clean, maintainable, production-ready code.
• Pragmatic mindset: You balance technical depth with a strong focus on delivering real-world impact.
• Ownership mentality: You take responsibility for your work end-to-end, from development to deployment and monitoring.
• Collaborative approach: You enjoy working in cross-functional teams and sharing knowledge with others.
• AI-native way of working (plus): We believe AI is fundamentally transforming how software is built. Experience with agent-assisted coding, human–AI collaboration, and modern multi-engineer AI workflows is a strong plus.

Why us 

• Real ownership: You will directly shape core AI systems and technical decisions at a critical stage of our growth — with real responsibility from day one, not just execution.
• High-impact problems: You will work on AI systems that operate in real, business-critical environments where correctness, reliability, and robustness truly matter.
• Build beyond the standard: We are not interested in generic solutions. You’ll work on complex knowledge systems and challenges that go beyond off-the-shelf RAG — often tackling problems that don’t have established solutions yet.
• Strong technical ambition: We care deeply about quality, pragmatism, and building AI that actually works in production — not just in demos.
• Momentum & scale: You will join a fast-growing, well-funded company with strong traction and the opportunity to help define how modern AI systems are built in production.

octonomy ist ein KI-Unternehmen mit Sitz in Köln, das sich auf die Entwicklung intelligenter KI-Agenten zur Automatisierung von Unternehmensprozessen spezialisiert hat. Mit seiner innovativen Technologie ermöglicht octonomy eine hochqualitative und schnelle Automatisierung von Support Services – von Kundenanfragen bis hin zu internen Mitarbeiter- und Partneranfragen. Die Mission des Unternehmens: Hochkomplexe Support-Prozesse so einfach automatisierbar machen wie nie zuvor.