About the Role
Join our founding team as technical lead for ML. You'll own the architecture behind Straion's AI: the systems that read software specs, requirements, and codebases, then guide coding agents to the right decisions. You set the technical direction, define what good looks like, and grow the ML team around you.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end architecture of our ML and LLM systems, from retrieval and ranking to inference and serving
- Architect NLP and LLM-based systems for intelligent spec, code analysis, and rule matching
- Build recommendation engines that surface the right rules based on spec context, project scope, team setup, and existing codebase conventions
- Develop semantic search across enterprise software specs, rules, and code repositories
- Set the evaluation standards for the team: eval harnesses, offline and online metrics, and regression gates that keep model quality from drifting
- Act as technical lead for ML: review designs, mentor the engineers who join after you, and raise the bar on ML engineering practice
- Help hire and grow the ML team together with the founders
- Shape product strategy by identifying where AI genuinely helps enterprise software development, and where it does not
- Actively participate in building a positive, inclusive, and learning-driven team environment
- Stay current with ML/AI research and decide what is worth adopting
Requirements
- 7+ years building production ML systems for technical / enterprise applications, including time as a technical lead or architect
- A track record of owning an ML system end to end in production: design, deployment, evaluation, monitoring, drift detection, and continuous improvement
- Deep hands-on experience building LLM-powered systems (for code generation, review, or documentation automation) including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over code and document corpora
- Strong LLM evaluation discipline: you have built eval harnesses that other engineers rely on, and you treat correctness and regression control as a first-class concern
- Experience setting technical standards for a team: architecture decisions, review culture, and documentation others can follow
- Experience mentoring or leading engineers, formally or informally
- Experience with vector databases and embeddings for semantic code search and similarity matching
- Expert-level Python with deep knowledge of ML frameworks (e.g. TensorFlow, PyTorch) and NLP libraries (e.g. spaCy, transformers)
- Enterprise software experience including API design, microservices, and cloud deployment
- MLOps experience: model/inference serving, deployment pipelines, and managing latency and cost in production
- Comfort with early-stage ambiguity: you pick a direction when nobody hands you one
- Excellent communication skills in English, both written and verbal
- Ability to evaluate trade-offs and balance scalability, maintainability, and performance
- BONUS POINT: Experience with agent / tool-use frameworks (e.g. LangChain) for multi-step reasoning over repositories
- BONUS POINT: Experience with observability platforms (e.g. Grafana, Axiom) for monitoring system health, model performance, and production telemetry
Compensation
Due to legal reasons in Austria, we are obliged to disclose the minimum salary for
this position in Austria, which is €70 000 gross per year based
on full-time employment.
We use a location-based pay model: actual compensation depends on your experience,
skills, and location. We offer a higher salary in line with qualifications and
experience.
Equity is part of your total compensation. You get a real stake in the company, so
you share in what we build together. We discuss the details openly with you during
the process.
How to Apply
Ready to join us? Send your CV and a brief introduction to
team@straion.com