Picnic is building a new generation of intelligent shopping experiences and fulfillment automation with AI. In our app, we help customers search in their own words, plan meals around their household and shop effortlessly. In our supply chain, automation helps us deliver efficiently and sustainably.
As an AI Platform Engineer, you’ll build the tools and infrastructure to take AI from experiment to dependable production system: model access, tracing, evaluation, fine-tuning and low-latency serving. You'll set the technical direction for how engineers build with AI, working closely with product teams across search, personalisation, and fulfillment automation.
Tricks of the tradeProvide an environment in which agents run at optimal cost: Evolve our AI Gateway with provider integrations, model routing, fallbacks, rate limits, privacy controls, and cost attribution.
Standardise LLM tracing, evals and benchmarking: Build end-to-end tracing, evaluation, and production monitoring across prompts, models, retrieval, tools, and agent state. Help teams turn human judgement and customer outcomes into repeatable evaluation sets.
Productionize open-weight models: Create the path to fine-tune, evaluate and serve open-weight models. Support real-time inference and high-throughput batch workloads, and make latency, performance and cost trade-offs visible.
Build a paved path for getting agents to run in production: Enable developers by providing clear APIs, SDKs, templates and local tooling for structured generation, tool use, model experiments and agent workflows. Make the supported path easier than assembling one-off infrastructure.
Our Tech: You’ll work with Python on a daily basis, using frameworks like FastAPI, LiteLLM, OpenAI, Gemini and more. Supporting this core stack are Snowflake, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Helm, Terraform, Vault, and Datadog. Our open-weight training and serving stack is one of the choices you'll help us make.
We’re looking for- Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, AI or a related field
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals, especially in Python
- Proven track record building self-service AI platforms and scaling their adoption
- Experience bringing language models or other ML/AI systems into production with meaningful reliability, latency, security, and cost requirements
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD and observability
- Able to take end-to-end ownership, make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions and work effectively across platform, ML/AI and product teams
+ Bonus points!
- Experience with LLM or agent gateways, tool protocols such as MCP, guardrails or policy-aware model access
- Experience with LLM fine-tuning and serving
🫱🏼🫲🏾 Teamwork makes the dream work
With more than 80 nationalities across 3 countries, you’ll be part of a diverse company with plenty of cool stuff to get involved with, from board game evenings to after-work drinks to our company ski trip and more!
💡 Make a difference
You’ll work in an awesome startup environment with the freedom to drive your own projects and create a visible impact. Our fully electric vehicles and sustainable business model mean you’ll also be contributing to making the world a better place!
🥗 Fresh Lunch, coffee, and snacks
Our offices are equipped with fully-fledged coffee bars and a kitchen and chefs. They prepare delicious fresh and warm lunches every day so you can keep your energy up.
🚲 Health insurance discount & bike plan
We have a partnership with CZ (a health insurance provider). Picnic employees get a discount on CZ insurance packages between 5% and 15%. Furthermore, through our partnership with Lease a Bike, you can rent-to-own a new (e)bike at a discounted rate
🌎 Relocation
If you’re moving from another country to join Picnic we make it as smooth as possible for you. We’ll cover your flight costs for you and your partner and kids, your first month's rent and moving costs (up to €2000), and help you with the 30% tax ruling setup and application.
📆 All the rest
At Picnic you get 25 holidays, we cover your travel expenses and offer a pension plan. And your phone and laptop are on us, as well.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, AI, or a related field
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals, especially in Python
- Proven track record building self-service AI platforms and scaling their adoption
- Experience bringing language models or other ML/AI systems into production with reliability, latency, security, and cost requirements
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and observability
- Ability to take end-to-end ownership, make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions, and work across platform, ML/AI, and product teams
- Experience with LLM or agent gateways, tool protocols such as MCP, guardrails, or policy-aware model access
- Experience with LLM fine-tuning and serving
What We Do
At Picnic, we’re revolutionizing the way people buy groceries. Our affordable and sustainable service is made possible by our passionate people, cutting-edge technology, efficient planning, and, of course, our fleet of iconic electric vehicles! It’s why our customer base is growing rapidly across the Netherlands, Germany, and France. One of the things that makes Picnic different is that we handle almost everything in-house: forecasting, developing our first automated warehouse and new electric Picnic vehicles, internal and customer-facing applications—the list goes on. It gives us more freedom when it comes to trying out new and innovative ideas, which is something we do a lot! We love to challenge ourselves and learn new things. Our teams have access to various meetups, language classes, ‘Lunch & Learn’ sessions, our very own Tech Academy, and tailored soft-skills training. Professional development is as important to us as the service we provide to our customers. As a diverse team made up of over 80 nationalities, there are always plenty of activities to get involved with, whether you’re into sports, board games, charitable causes, dancing (at our legendary Picnic festival), or licorice tasting—yes, even that! Our scale-up culture means you get to own your role and bring fresh ideas to the table. So, if you’re looking for an opportunity to make a real difference, get in touch—we’d love to hear from you.
