AI Engineering Lead

Do you thrive on tackling complex challenges? Are you passionate about creating impactful solutions that drive commerce forward? Do you believe in encouraging and elevating those around you?

Kustom, formerly known as Klarna Checkout (KCO), is the Nordic market leader in digital checkout solutions. Today, we support over 24,000 merchants across more than 170 countries, providing a streamlined checkout experience. We offer localized solutions in 18 markets, tailored to specific languages, currencies, and payment methods. No matter where businesses operate, we deliver a checkout experience that meets the needs of both merchants and shoppers – driving growth globally. 🌍

As AI Engineering Lead, you own Kustom's AI product and architecture strategy. You decide where AI creates real business value, build the platform and infrastructure behind it, and enable every engineering team to use AI safely and efficiently.

This is hands-on technical leadership that reaches across Product, Engineering, Data, Security, and Leadership. You will write production code, build prototypes, evaluate models, and shape our long-term architecture.

Our teams are based in Stockholm, where we prioritize in-person collaboration at our office to foster strong team dynamics.

• AI architecture: Design and build Kustom’s AI platform, including model routing, agentic commerce, agentic protocols, and CLI strategy

• Build vs partner: Evaluate when to use AI partners versus building internal capabilities

• Data foundation: Make Kustom’s data AI-ready across quality, indexing, structured and unstructured data, embeddings, semantic search, and context management

• Product enablement: Help Product Managers and Engineers identify and ship high-value AI opportunities across merchant experience and developer experience

• Future technology: Continuously evaluate foundation models, open-source models, agentic systems, multimodal AI, AI infrastructure, knowledge graphs, MCP, and CLI ecosystems

• Technical standards: Establish reusable capabilities, patterns, and architecture standards that product teams can consume

• Strong curiosity and engagement in the frontier movement within AI

• 7+ years in Software / AI Engineering

• Strong backend engineering experience

• Some experience with data engineering platforms

• Some experience with cloud platforms

• Some experience building scalable distributed systems

And several of: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Vector databases, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, RAG, CLIs, MCP, Agents, context engineering, Knowledge Graphs, GraphRAG, Event-driven architectures

• Build things before they become popular

• Spend weekends trying the newest AI models

• Read research papers for fun

• Care deeply about software architecture

• Enjoy solving impossible technical problems

• Prefer building platforms over one-off features

• Like shipping fast while maintaining engineering quality

Within your first 12 months, you've:

• Driven further adoption and future-proof validation of Kustom AI product offering

• Enabled multiple engineering teams to ship AI-powered products

• Reduced merchant integration effort through AI tooling (CLIs, etc)

• Identified and delivered measurable business impact from AI

• Positioned Kustom as an AI-native commerce platform

• Secure your future with a competitive pension package, including both national and occupational pension contributions.

• Comprehensive health coverage with extensive health insurance, long-term illness protection, and flexible salary exchange options.

• Invest in your wellbeing with an annual wellness allowance of 3,000 SEK to spend on the activities that keep you healthy and energized.

• More time to enjoy life with an extra day off when major holidays, such as Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, fall on a weekend.

At Kustom, you won’t just be another face in the crowd. This is a place where we elevate each other and celebrate success as a team. We believe in our ability to create excellence – and have fun doing it!

We know we set high expectations, but we also know that the road to success isn’t a straight line. We support and encourage each other to try, to fail, to try again. Because that’s how we grow, individually and together.

Does this sound like the place for you?

• Please apply in English. At Kustom, we welcome everyone! We don’t care where you’re from, whom you love, or what kind of food is your favorite (unless we’re celebrating together, then we’ll need to know 😉!). We believe in inclusivity for all.

• Given the above, we treat all candidates the same! That’s why we have this awesome recruitment tool to keep track of all the amazing talents that apply - so please; apply through the system and we’ll make sure to keep you updated along the recruitment process. Please note that we can’t keep track of CVs or similar documents sent via email.

• We value your privacy! When you apply, we'll handle your data with care. Want to know more about how we use your information? Check out our FAQs at the bottom of the jobs page – we've got all the details there for you!