Senior AI/ML Engineer (Spectrum) Amsterdam, Netherlands

Role Overview
Spectrum collects data from an organization's code, docs, and issues, and organizes knowledge in a unified ontology that AI agents can efficiently search through and reason over. We aim to revolutionize the semantic layer space for software-building organizations and move beyond specs that fall out of sync with code, introducing a living spec – one that's extracted from the whole system and used to keep it aligned. Spectrum is meant to be the single source of truth for all product and architectural knowledge.

A resident of JetBrains' startup incubator, Spectrum enjoys startup speed and autonomy, and is backed by 25 years of developer tooling expertise. We are looking for a Senior AI/ML Engineer to build and evolve the ML-powered systems at the heart of our product.

Responsibilities
Your responsibilities will include:
- Designing and building the ML/LLM solution for data ingestion, knowledge extraction and retrieval, and subsequent reasoning.
- Creating datasets, metrics, and pipelines that drive measurable improvements across the system.
- Architecting and improving AI agents, which will involve prompt engineering, model selection, and inference optimization.
- Contributing to our MLOps practices, including orchestration, observability, and experiment tracking.

Requirements and Qualifications
We expect you to have:
- At least four years of experience building ML/AI systems in production environments, with hands-on LLM experience.
- A deep understanding of the LLM ecosystem, including model architectures and fine-tuning approaches.
- Hands-on experience with:
- Prompt engineering and LLM pipeline design, including evaluation.
- Agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, Pydantic AI, or an equivalent.
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns and vector databases.
- Deploying and scaling LLM-powered applications using APIs (e.g. OpenAI or Anthropic) or open-source models.
- Strong Python skills – Kotlin knowledge would be a plus.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
- Proficiency in English, both written and verbal.

Our ideal candidate would also have:
- Experience with ontologies, knowledge graphs, or graph-based reasoning.
- Experience in early-stage startups – you enjoy the zero-to-one phase.
- A background in code analysis, developer tools, or software engineering research.
- Experience with multi-agent systems or complex agentic workflows.
- Actively contributed to relevant open-source projects or publications.

What We Offer
- A competitive salary and JetBrains benefits.
- A generous runway and corporate resources with startup autonomy.
- A motivated team that moves fast, with short feedback loops, rapid prototyping, and lots of ownership.
- Opportunities to publish research at top venues in collaboration with JetBrains Research.