Company Description

With over 25 years’ experience, plus the same enormous passion and ambition we had on day-one, we’re trailblazers in the pet e-commerce industry. Our solutions make over 12 million customers genuinely happier – and that’s something we really care about. We work together to continually adapt; embracing change and the challenges it brings so that we can keep doing better. Join us and discover a place where your potential meets your passion for pets. That’s the power of plus.

Job Description

We are looking for a Senior AI Engineer in Source & Supply area of zooplus to design, build, and operate production-grade AI applications. In this role, you will develop backend services and APIs that integrate large language models into business workflows, with a strong focus on reliability, safety, observability, and maintainability.

This is an engineering-first role for someone with strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on experience delivering LLM-powered systems to production. You should be comfortable owning services end to end, adapting them as models and requirements evolve, and helping teams adopt effective AI engineering practices.

What you will do:

• Build and operate production-grade AI services and backend applications in Python

• Design and implement LLM-powered workflows, including prompt design, context management, structured outputs, and tool calling.

• Define robust contracts for APIs and AI outputs.

• Test, evaluate, and improve AI services through automated testing, prompt iteration, and measurable evaluation approaches.

• Implement safety and reliability controls such as validation, guardrails, fallbacks, and error handling.

• Monitor and improve production systems using logs, metrics, traces, and AI observability tooling.

• Work closely with engineers, product owners, and domain stakeholders to turn ambiguous use cases into production-ready solutions.

• Continuously improve systems through model upgrades, prompt iteration, and operational optimisation.

Qualifications

What you bring:

• Strong Python and backend engineering skills for building production-grade services and APIs.

• Proven experience developing and shipping LLM-powered applications in production.

• Strong understanding of prompt engineering, structured outputs, context management, and tool calling.

• Experience integrating foundation models and LLM platforms such as Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, or Bedrock.

• Strong experience in API design, testing, deployment discipline, observability, evaluation, and failure handling.

• Solid practical understanding of AI safety, reliability, and evaluation, including guardrails, fallback patterns, and output validation.

• A pragmatic approach to solving messy real-world problems with clean, maintainable systems.

• Curious, delivery-focused, and comfortable working in a fast-moving technical landscape.

Nice to have:

• Experience designing and operating LLM systems with orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, MCP, RAG, Graph databases

• Familiarity with platform engineering practices such as Infrastructure as Code and performance testing for production APIs.

• Experience working with Java or Kotlin

• Ability to prototype and experiment quickly using tools such as streamlit and Jupyter notebooks.

• Background in applied NLP tasks such as classification or PII detection.

Why This Role Matters

This role will help shape how zooplus moves AI from experimentation into reliable production systems that improve engineering velocity and business outcomes.

Additional Information

Headquartered in Munich, with offices across Madrid, Krakow, Wroclaw, London and Vienna, we collaborate because we genuinely love working together - so you’ll be at the heart of an incredible, multinational team. We trust each other to get the job done, which means you’ll benefit from hybrid working, spending 60% of your time in the office and 40% at home. There’s an option to work for 20 days abroad in approved countries too.

Add to that development opportunities that help you to shape your own career path, excellent training and support, wellbeing offers, subsidised transport or bike leasing, plus 20% discount across all our products, and you’ll begin to get a sense of what sets us apart. Find out more about the specific benefits at your local office in our blog posts.

At zooplus, we believe in equal opportunity and support everyone to fulfil their potential. We recognise the power of listening and learning from each other and embrace diversity and inclusion of all.

#LI-Hybrid

✈️ Two extra vacation days and days off on 24th and 31st of December
Private medical care and life insurance
️ Multicafeteria system including Multisport card