Principal Engineer / Engineering Lead — Agentic AI

Are you a deeply hands-on senior engineer who wants to own the technical core of a frontier AI product — architecting, reviewing and shipping code, not just running a team?

Our client is a fast-growing Zurich-based B2B AI software company and Microsoft partner, building agentic AI that executes business processes end-to-end — software agents that don't just assist, but carry work through to a finished, human-approved result. As they scale the platform, they're bringing in a very senior engineering leader to take operational and technical ownership of the product — effectively much of what a CTO owns, with the freedom to stay hands-on.

What you'll own

• End-to-end architecture of an agentic platform on Azure, and the critical engineering decisions behind it
• Design and orchestration of multi-agent systems and artefact generation across the product
• Production-grade reliability — evaluation, regression and observability, so agent behaviour is measurable and dependable
• Backend services on Azure, plus contributions to the React/TypeScript front-end (including approval/audit UI)
• Engineering standards (code review, CI, modular AI components, connectors) — raising the bar across a small, high-calibre team
• This is a hands-on individual-contributor / tech-lead role. People management is deliberately secondary: you architect, review and code.

What you bring

• Substantial software engineering experience at senior / staff / principal level, with a track record of building and operating production systems
• Hands-on experience with production AI / agent systems — real users, real traffic, real failure modes (chat wrappers alone aren't enough)
• Experience designing and orchestrating multi-agent systems
• A strong cloud-native / Azure architecture background
• Fluency with modern AI/agent tooling — orchestration frameworks, evaluation pipelines, MCP-style connectors, Azure AI Foundry
• English fluent (working language); German a plus, not a must

Why this role

• A frontier mission — a genuine autonomous-execution platform, not a chatbot wrapper
• CTO-level scope and ownership of the technical core, without title politics
• Meaningful equity participation for strong profiles — real upside, not a token
• A strong Microsoft / Azure foundation and ecosystem to build on
• Direct access to the founders and leadership, short decision paths, fast execution
• A small, high-calibre team where your decisions matter — central Zurich location by the lake; international, English-speaking

The mandate

NWS Executive Search is conducting this search exclusively for our client. The process is handled in strict confidence — absolute discretion is assured.

Interested?

Apply with your profile, or reach out for a confidential first conversation — we're happy to tell you more.