Senior AI Engineer (m/f/d)

Join us to make education accessible for all! Strengthen our Syntea AI team in full-time (40 hrs./week) as Senior AI Engineer (m/f/d) within Germany or UK remotely or at one of our office locations .

In this role you'll help build the AI systems behind Syntea, IU's own AI-powered learning assistant and a critical part of IU's AI-first strategy. Syntea acts as a personal AI tutor for IU's distance-learning students, now supporting more than 80,000 learners with conversational tutoring, adaptive learning, study organization, and administrative tools in a single chat-based platform. As an AI engineer, you'll help design and build the LLM- and agent-powered services that make all of this work, at scale and in production.

Your tasks

• Help build and maintain the backend services and APIs that power Syntea, its domain agents, and AI-driven micro-apps.
• Develop LLM-powered and agentic pipelines — prompting, retrieval (RAG), orchestration, and tool use — ensuring scalability, modularity, and reliability across the Syntea ecosystem.
• Partner with Product and other engineers to turn research ideas and prototypes into robust, production-grade AI services.
• Help test and evaluate AI features — from prompt and model evaluation to monitoring and continuous improvement in production.
• Own data engineering for personalization : turn existing student data (study goals, usage patterns, gamification signals) into personalized, context-aware responses and proposals.

Your Profile

• 5 years of professional software/AI engineering experience, with solid Python skills and some experience shipping production services in a product team.
• Deep, hands-on experience building production LLM/AI systems — retrieval, tool use, orchestration — ideally including multi-agent or agentic architectures. AI depth is the heart of this role.
• Experience with AI evaluation and quality (offline/online eval, automated analysis of model outputs) and a rigorous, data-driven mindset.
• Solid data engineering ability: modeling and pipelines that feed personalization and analytics.
• Awareness of AI security and safety considerations in user-facing systems.

We offer

• Be you at IU : We support and empower you to achieve your personal and professional goals. After all, your happiness significantly contributes to a positive and productive environment.
• Work wherever you want... : Digitalization is part of our DNA. Decide for yourself which place sparks the most productivity in you. You love remote work? No problem! Would you like to work abroad for a while? Our WorkFlex Benefit makes it possible.
• ... and flexible in terms of time: It's your job; We trust you and give you the greatest possible freedom to organize yourself.
• Take your knowledge to a new level: Where else, if not with us? Enjoy free access to all our e-learning platforms. In addition, we will finance you a complete technology course of your choic
• Make your journey sustainable: Whether it's a DeutschlandTicket subsidised to just €13.45, or a Jobrad (bike leasing) offer, enjoy the freedom of mobility for both work and personal activities, while also making an eco-friendly choice.
• 33 days to rest: Taking breaks is important! In addition to 30 flexible vacation days per year, we also give you additional days off on your birthday, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve.

IU International University of Applied Science (IU) is Germany's largest university of applied science - and we are not just an excellent choice for studying, but also an outstanding Great Place to Work®! As an Edutech company, we rely on state-of-the-art technology and data-driven approaches. That's why AI-driven voice assistants and other GPT systems have long become part of our daily work routine, helping us to focus on exciting projects. Here at IU over 4,000 employees are dedicated to making a difference.

Become part of our Engineering team! We're passionate, competitive, open to all things new - and we love data. We live to code anything that makes IU students and IU services better.

Sounds like the perfect job for you? Then apply now! Simple, fast and even without a cover letter. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact Ronja at ronja.kaiser@iu.org.

Please note that, for data protection reasons, we are not allowed to process email applications.

Actions speak louder than words: We cherish our "Culture of Everyone" and would like to take this opportunity to empathize that we do not tolerate discrimination towards any race, gender, religion, age, sexual orientation or disability. We welcome you as you are and look forward to nurturing our diverse community at the IU!