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.

About Us

octonomy is an AI company based in Cologne, specializing in the development of intelligent AI agents for automating business processes. With its innovative technology, octonomy enables high-quality and rapid automation of support services – from customer inquiries to internal employee and partner requests. The company's mission: to make highly complex support processes easier to automate than ever before.