AI Engineer – Data & LLM Pipelines – up to 80K – Utrecht / Hybrid
Join us and help launch our new AI-driven platform for grant matching!
Applying for grants is often complex and time-consuming — we want to change that and help researchers and companies do what they do best: focus on impactful research and innovation. That’s why we started building an AI-driven platform that automates the process of writing grant proposals. Now we’re going one step further: a grant matching product that connects applicants to the calls most likely to fund them. To make that work, we need a rock-solid corpus of European grant calls underneath it — and that’s where you come in.
Although we are a small and fast-moving team, we are closely connected to Brainial, an AI-driven SaaS company transforming tender management, and Catalyze, a leading innovation consultancy specialized in funding and innovation strategy. This gives us the unique combination of startup speed, deep domain expertise, and the opportunity to build something meaningful from the ground up. We are now looking for an experienced AI Engineer who will take ownership of the data and LLM infrastructure behind our grant matching product end-to-end.
This challenge is perfect for you if you:
- are an engineer with 3+ years of production experience; You’ve owned data systems end-to-end. You are proactive and independent, but thrive in collaboration. You enjoy turning complex challenges into practical steps and communicating them clearly - making collaboration easy and enjoyable for others. Bonus point if you have academic background;
- have demonstrable seniority with Python - async, SQL, schema design, the works, bonus points if you’ve worked with vector databases at production scale;
- have integrated heterogeneous data sources in production - vendor APIs, public APIs, scraping - and have done deduplication or entity resolution you can describe in detail. Know your way around a modern scraping toolkit and have an opinion on when to reach for LLM-driven extraction;
- have built production LLM pipelines: retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation harnesses. You can talk concretely about hallucination quantification and faithfulness scoring instead of treating them as buzzwords.
Some of the benefits we offer:
- Working with ambitious and driven people in a great start-up environment. We’re ambitious, not exhausting. You’ll have the freedom and flexibility to do your best work in a way that suits you;
- As we’ve just started, we have many exciting plans ahead. This means plenty of growth opportunities: with rapid growth, new roles emerge. Deliver results, show energy, and challenge assumptions, and you’ll quickly take on new challenges and responsibilities;
- A space to grow. We support continuous learning — through research, courses, and curiosity — and value the knowledge you bring back to the team;
- Real impact. Working in the grant funding field means you help some of the most innovative companies and researchers make a real difference;
- Hybrid working is supported, but we like to work together in the office three days a week — yes, there will be snacks.
A gross annual salary of up to 80k, a secondary benefits package, and of course the essentials like a laptop and travel card. 30% ruling support is available for eligible international hires.
Interested!? Apply via LinkedIn or contact Stephan via stephan@salentorecruitment.com
