About us

The appliedAI Initiative elevates Europe’s industry to become shapers in the age of AI, creating a future that we desire to live in. Through our ecosystem of strong partners, comprehensive programs, services and solutions we advance companies holistically on their AI journey. With our uniquely diverse, interdisciplinary, and driven team, we build on deep technical expertise while specializing on applicability of the solutions. We share a mindset of collaboration and openness with our ecosystem of leading companies and tech players. Our common goal is to strengthen the European landscape, jointly creating unique knowledge for applying trustworthy AI. We believe that AI Agents will be the dominant topic for AI in the near future and that appliedAI with its partner ecosystem will impact how this technology is being used in industry and beyond in Europe.

Your mission

In every industrial company there is a problem the engineers have stopped raising, because everyone agrees it cannot be solved. A design that takes three days to validate. A variant that has to be quoted before anyone has drawn it. Forty years of engineering knowledge sitting in files nobody can search. Those problems are our work, and this is the role that takes them on: the technical lead for AI across design, simulation and manufacturing, trusted by clients with the question nobody has answered yet.
Your tasks will include:

Setting the technical direction for our industrial AI portfolio across design, simulation and manufacturing, and deciding which approach a problem actually deserves
Taking engineering problems that arrive badly defined and turning them into something that can be solved
Carrying the specialist authority in client projects, making the calls that decide whether a prototype becomes a system people rely on
Shaping new engagements with engineering and R&D leaders, from the first workshop to the signed proposal
Leaving behind reference architectures, evaluation methods and accelerators that the whole practice can build on
Growing the depth of the engineers around you through coaching, standards and hands-on reviews

Your profile

Ten years or more in computational engineering across design, simulation and manufacturing, earned through a doctorate in a computational field, or through an equal weight of industrial work
You know how the chain holds together: how geometry and constraints are set, how a design is validated numerically, how it becomes something a factory can make, and what breaks at every handover
You choose the method a problem deserves - surrogate and reduced-order models, physics-informed and data-driven modelling, optimisation, generative geometry, agents - and you still get somewhere when there is almost nothing to learn from
You start from what the customer needs rather than from what happens to sit in their database, and you can hold that conversation with an engineering leader in German or English, on their shop floor as readily as on a call
Extensive experience getting software in production, with the habits that come with it: testing, CI/CD, observability, and being the person who gets called when it stops
AI systems you have put into operation and kept running, models and agents alike: evaluated, guarded, affordable at load, and honest about how they fail
The commercial instinct to see which technically beautiful answer a client will actually buy, most likely built as a founder, an early employee, or an intrapreneur who carried real risk

What we offer

A highly qualified and motivated team of ~90 people is on a journey to change the rapidly evolving European AI Landscape
Experience the best of both worlds with our hybrid work model: You can choose to work from our vibrant offices - either at the IPAI in Heilbronn or the House of Communication in Munich - while also enjoying the flexibility to work remotely a few days each week
Opportunity to shape a variety of projects and the development of new, original content based on the latest developments in AI and its adoption in businesses
An atmosphere that encourages to think and experiment in new ways with software, hardware, and processes
A highly visible initiative that helps you build a large and high-level network of start-ups, partners, and tech companies
A flexible development budget that’s yours to shape - invest it in training, certifications, conferences, or new challenges, however you want to grow
Sports membership with Wellpass to access thousands of sports facilities all over Germany (and beyond), as well as online courses
JobRad: Lease a bike for a cheaper rate via JobRad and we cover the bike insurance on top
Sabbatical option: You

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Principal AI Engineer (m/f/x) - Industrial AI Engineering at Appliedai