Head of AI ML; Lead Engineering Manager

Xcede is partnering with a global energy and sustainability business operating across 20 countries, with around 6,000 employees and over €1 billion in revenue. Their smart metering products reach 14 million homes and commercial properties, and a strong regulatory tailwind is set to drive growth across the next decade. The business is now building AI/ML into a long‑term core capability and is looking for a technical leader to shape how that function is built, run, and scaled.

This is a leadership role sitting above three AI engineering teams covering knowledge curation and NLP, conversational and agentic AI (including a production voicebot), and platform engineering. You will own technical standards, architecture and technology decisions, and people development across a team of 5 to 6 AI/ML engineers, reporting directly into the VP of Product. The focus is on quality, impact, and scalability rather than daily hands‑on coding, but this is a role for a strong engineer who leads strong engineers, so deep and current ML/NLP expertise is essential.

• Setting technical standards and best practices for production AI systems, with a focus on conversational and agentic AI
• Owning architecture and technology decisions tied to measurable business value, not AI hype
• Translating complex business requirements into clear AI/ML strategy across automation, knowledge management, and decision support
• Building evaluation and testing frameworks, production monitoring, and observability, including model and data drift, rollbacks, and compliance
• Leading, coaching, and mentoring engineers, and developing roles, skill profiles, and career paths within the chapter
• Working closely with product, business, and top management, including expectation and risk management for probabilistic AI systems
• Staying close to developments in LLMs, agentic systems, and orchestration, and feeding that into strategy

• Several years in AI/ML engineering with deep, current, hands‑on expertise. This is a technical leadership role and applied ML/NLP depth is non‑negotiable
• Strong knowledge of machine learning, LLMs, and modern AI architectures, plus RAG, vector databases, and orchestration frameworks such as Lang Chain or Lang Graph
• Strong Python and solid software engineering foundations (system architecture, data pipelines, APIs)
• Cloud experience across Azure, AWS, or GCP
• Experience with model evaluation, monitoring, and observability in production, including model and data drift
• Understanding of security and compliance, particularly around PII and AI risk
• Demonstrated leadership experience in an engineering environment, technical and/or disciplinary
• Consulting, in‑house consulting, or stakeholder‑heavy backgrounds are a plus
• Fluent German (C1/C2) and strong English are essential

• Up to €150,000 depending on experience, including a company performance bonus that has paid out every year for the past five years
• 30 days holiday
• Hybrid working, around 50% remote, with a flexible split
• High visibility and real influence over product and business decisions, reporting into the VP of Product

If interested, please apply or contact Norman Cistovas at Xcede.