Senior AI Engineer (Contractor)

📍 Warsaw-based | Occasional travel to Amsterdam | Project-based engagement

We're Altura, an ambitious SaaS startup, and we just raised our Series A.

At Altura, we're making it easier for organisations to win complex deals (tenders and RfPs). With our AI-powered platform, we simplify bid management by turning it into a smooth, strategic process. We connect workflows, automate tasks, and make knowledge accessible, so teams can work more efficiently and effectively.

But we're not stopping there.

We're building the first AI-powered Agentic Virtual Bid Management Assistant, designed to automate the entire bid lifecycle. With fresh funding, big ambitions, and a fast-growing team across Amsterdam and London, we're just getting started.

If you value innovation, enjoy high ownership, and want to shape the AI backbone of a Series A SaaS company, we'd love to talk.

TL;DR

As a Senior AI Engineer (Contractor), you'll join a high-caliber team building the agentic layer that powers Altura's next evolution.

This is not a "plug prompts into an API" role.

You'll design and ship real agentic workflows: context-aware, production-grade systems that sit on top of our proprietary data graph and become a core technical moat.

You'll work in a small, fast-moving team with freedom to experiment: Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and new frontier models the day they drop. If something meaningfully advances the state of the art, we use it.

You'll drive high-impact AI initiatives end-to-end, owning outcomes across:

• Discovery and greenfield prototyping

• Model evaluation and multi-model strategy

• Production rollout, observability, and continuous improvement

Beyond product capabilities, you'll help shape foundational AI platform components: context engineering, agent orchestration, evaluation frameworks, tone monitoring, and online observability.

No corporate red tape. No endless committees. Just ownership, speed, and real technical influence.

You'll deliver AI systems that are:

• Reliable in production

• Scalable across customers

• Measurable in impact

• Cost-aware by design

And you'll help define what "great AI engineering" looks like inside a Series A company operating at the leading edge.

Engagement Model

This is a B2B contractor engagement, intended for experienced independent professionals or those operating through their own registered entity.

• Location: Warsaw, Poland (remote-first)

• Scope: Deliverable- and milestone-based; we estimate a high-intensity engagement for the foreseeable project horizon

• Schedule: Flexible — we care about outcomes, not hours logged

• Travel: Occasional visits to our Amsterdam office for on-site collaboration and strategic working sessions

• Non-exclusive: We welcome contractors who maintain a broader client portfolio

• Long-term collaboration preferred, subject to mutual agreement and scope renewal

• Salary (Monthly Range): Based on a 40-hour work week €7K – €9K per month

Candidates are expected to be registered as a sole trader (jednoosobowa działalność gospodarcza) or operate through their own legal entity, and are responsible for their own tax and social security (ZUS) obligations in Poland.

Our Tech Stack

• AI: Python

• Frontend: Vue.js and Next.js

• Backend: C# — ASP.NET

• Infrastructure: Azure, GitHub, Linear

What You'll Deliver

• Design and deliver an agentic layer and a rich context graph that automates complex work with deep integration into customers' knowledge repositories

• Drive architecture & delivery of production LLM/GenAI systems across context engineering, agentic workflows, model evaluations, and multi-model strategies

• Define and implement evaluation: offline and online metrics, gold sets and regression tests, human review loops, and A/B experiments

• Operationalize LLMOps: deployment patterns, observability and monitoring, incident response, and performance and cost optimization (latency, throughput, token spend)

• Build guardrails & security: prompt-injection defenses, data-exfiltration prevention, tool permissions and action constraints, safe handling of sensitive data

• Establish engineering standards: reference implementations, reusable libraries, review practices, and documentation that accelerates the team

• Raise the bar on system design and code quality; align workstreams on outcomes and timelines as a technical force multiplier

What We're Looking For

Minimum qualifications

• Extensive experience in AI/ML software engineering with multiple production launches

• Strong software engineering fundamentals (system design, testing, reliability, APIs)

• Proven experience with LLM application patterns (context engineering, embeddings/vector search, structured outputs, prompt design)

• Hands-on experience building evaluation and monitoring systems for model quality in production

• Comfortable in cloud environments (Azure), containers, CI/CD, and modern observability

• Excellent cross-functional communication skills — you turn ambiguity into plans, tradeoffs, and shipped outcomes

Nice to have

• Experience optimising inference (caching, batching, routing, quantization)

• Experience serving or fine-tuning open-source models

• Experience building internal AI platforms (evaluation harnesses, prompt/version management systems)

What Success Looks Like in 90–180 Days

• Delivery of AI-native capabilities aligned with product goals and risk constraints

• A repeatable evaluation and release process that prevents regressions and enables fast iteration

• AI systems in production with monitoring, guardrails, and measurable business impact

• Clear technical standards that elevate the entire engineering organisation

Hiring Process

1. Recruiter Screen (30 min)

2. Meet the Team & System Design (60 min)

3. Pair Programming Session (60 min)

4. CEO Final

5. Offer

What We Offer

• Competitive market rates, invoiced on a B2B basis

• High-impact role shaping the AI backbone of a Series A SaaS company

• Full ownership and technical influence

• Flexible, remote-first work setup with no fixed hours requirement

• Occasional travel to Amsterdam for in-person collaboration

• Modern tooling and the freedom to experiment with frontier AI systems