AI Engineer — Search & NLP

About the role

We're looking for a Senior ML/AI Engineer to own language AI at Plato. You'll build the NLP infrastructure that powers multiple product areas: conversational analytics (chat with your data / text-to-SQL), semantic search, document extraction, and AI chat interfaces. This is a broad role combining structured data querying, retrieval systems, and information extraction.

What you'll do

• Build text-to-SQL systems that let users query business data in natural language
• Design and build semantic search infrastructure serving both UI search and agentic AI features
• Develop information extraction pipelines that turn emails, PDFs, and documents into structured, actionable data
• Create AI chat interfaces that combine data queries with document retrieval
• Own retrieval architecture: embedding pipelines, hybrid search, reranking, evaluation
• Build evaluation frameworks and feedback loops that improve systems over time
• Fine-tune models on B2B wholesale domain data where off-the-shelf solutions fall short
• Own architecture decisions — you'll influence the tech stack

What you'll need

• Strong NLP fundamentals — you understand transformers, embeddings, attention mechanisms, not just API calls
• Experience building production systems in at least one of: text-to-SQL, search/retrieval, information extraction, or conversational AI
• Familiarity with LLMs beyond prompting — RAG architectures, context management, grounding, evaluation
• Solid software engineering practices — your code is tested, documented, maintainable
• Building NLP/ML systems in production (not just notebooks)
• Working with LLMs and embedding models beyond basic prompting
• Evaluating and improving system quality systematically

Nice to have

• Experience with text-to-SQL systems, semantic parsing, or natural language interfaces to databases
• Knowledge of retrieval systems (hybrid search, reranking, evaluation metrics)
• Experience fine-tuning models (embeddings, extractors, or similar) on domain data
• Familiarity with OCR, PDF parsing, or document understanding
• Understanding of B2B/wholesale domain or ERP systems
• Multi-lingual NLP experience (German/English)

What they offer

• Modern office in Berlin-Mitte with a collaborative team culture
• Small, elite team where everyone knows everyone
• Direct access to founders and customers — no bureaucracy
• Your work ships fast and impacts the business immediately