Senior AI Engineer (Contractor)
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
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
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Meet the Team & System Design (60 min)
Pair Programming Session (60 min)
CEO Final
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