AI Engineer – LLM Specialist

We are looking for a skilled AI Engineer with a strong focus on testing, evaluating, and operationalizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to join our growing team. In this role, you will ensure that our language models meet high standards of accuracy, robustness, safety, and performance, and that they integrate seamlessly into our Speech-to-Text and AI-driven application landscape.

You will work closely with product, full-stack, and infrastructure engineers to transform state-of-the-art language models into reliable, production-ready systems that solve real customer problems. You make prototypes production ready.

LLM Evaluation & Testing

• Design and maintain systematic evaluation frameworks for LLMs, including:
  • Automated test suites
  • Golden datasets
  • Regression benchmarks
• Define quantitative metrics (e.g., accuracy, latency, hallucination rate, task success) and qualitative evaluation protocols.
• Perform error analysis and root-cause investigations on model failures.

Task Alignment & Optimization

• Focus on rapid prototyping and operationalization of customer use cases
• Improve model performance on specific tasks using a prompt-first workflow (system prompts, few-shot examples, tool instructions).
• Build and iterate evaluation sets; run experiments to measure quality, latency, and cost.
• Curate high-signal datasets for automated prompt optimization (cleaning, labeling, filtering, augmentation).
• Apply lightweight adaptation when beneficial (prompt tuning, parameter-efficient methods like LoRA/adapters).
• Use supervised fine-tuning / instruction tuning when prompting and lightweight methods don’t reach the target.
• Prepare and curate training datasets (cleaning, labeling, augmentation, filtering).
• Evaluate and compare open-source and commercial LLMs for specific use cases.
• Design controlled experiments (A/B tests, offline evaluations).
• Document results and recommend model choices.
• Collaborate with full-stack engineers to integrate prototypes into product, backend services and user-facing applications.
• Support API design for model inference and post-processing.
• Ensure models behave reliably in real-time and batch workflows.

Quality, Safety & Guardrails

• Implement mechanisms to:
• Reduce hallucinations
• Enforce output formats
• Apply content filters
• Detect and handle unsafe or low-confidence outputs

Performance & Cost Optimization

• Optimize inference latency and throughput.
• Balance model size, quantization, batching, and caching strategies.
• Monitor and optimize inference costs.

MLOps & Lifecycle Management

• Version models, datasets, prompts, and evaluation results.
• Monitor model performance in production and detect drift.
• Work closely with product managers to translate requirements into model behaviors.
• Support internal teams with guidance on prompt design and model usage.
• Contribute to documentation and internal best practices.
• Define standards for dataset quality, labeling guidelines, and storage.
• Maintain traceability between datasets, experiments, and deployed models.

Synthetic Data Generation

• Use LLMs or other techniques to generate synthetic training data where real data is scarce.

Agentic LLMs

• Design and test LLM workflows that call tools, functions, or external APIs.

Human-in-the-Loop Workflows

• Design feedback loops where human reviewers validate or correct model outputs.

Research Scouting

• Track relevant papers, frameworks, and open-source projects.

Internal Enablement

• Create internal guidelines for prompt writing and evaluation.
• Run occasional knowledge-sharing sessions.

AI / ML Experience

• At least 3–5 years of experience in machine learning or applied AI.
• Practical experience working with LLMs in production or advanced prototypes.
• Experience with PyTorch or Tensor Flow.
• Familiarity with fine-tuning techniques and training pipelines.
• Strong understanding of experimental design.

Programming Skills

• Familiarity with REST APIs and backend integration.
• Experience with dataset preprocessing, labeling pipelines, and versioning.
• Familiarity with Docker, CI/CD, and model deployment.

Analytical Mindset

• Ability to reason about model behavior and failure modes.

Communication

• Good verbal and written communication in English and German.
• Startup Mentality
• Comfortable with ambiguity, fast iteration, and high ownership.

• Opportunity to participate in Alpine
  
  AI’s company shares program after initiation period.
• Dynamic, innovation-driven culture.
• High autonomy and real product impact.
• Close collaboration with experts in speech, NLP, and applied AI.
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI technologies.

Don’t Apply If

• You are not willing to work on-site in Zurich or Davos.
• You do not have a work permission for Switzerland.
• You have never worked in a startup environment.

Learn more about Alpine

AI at: (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below)..swiss

Ready to help customers succeed with AI? Apply now with your CV and a short cover letter. We look forward to hearing from you.