Application Engineer

Salary: €55,000–€85,000 per year, plus an annual bonus.

About The Company

KI Group delivers market intelligence, pricing data, and analysis for the European plastics and chemicals industries. Founded in 1971 as a specialist information service for the plastics sector, the company has grown into a technology business combining industry expertise, journalism, software development, and data analysis. Its platforms provide current market data, price indices, and insights to decision-makers in plastics, chemicals, automotive, and pharmaceuticals, as well as across supply chains and energy and raw-material markets.

With its new SaaS platform, pricenxt, KI Group is making proprietary market data more accessible and actionable. The company serves customers in Germany, across Europe, and worldwide, helping them make informed decisions in complex global markets.

About The Role

As a (Senior) LLM Application Engineer, you will build and own the AI layer of pricenxt, from initial concept through production and ongoing improvement. You will work with proprietary market data that is difficult to find elsewhere and with paying customers who can provide feedback from the start. Your first focus will be AI features for pricenxt users; in time, you will also develop internal tools that help editorial and sales teams work more effectively.

This is a hands-on engineering role with room to influence product direction. You will help determine which AI use cases are valuable enough to launch, make technical decisions, and communicate their impact to colleagues beyond engineering.

Qualifications

You have several years of experience as a software engineer and have personally delivered at least one LLM-powered feature to production that is used by real customers. You have practical experience operating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in production, including vector databases, retrieval, chunking, evaluation, and grounding. You are confident building backend services in Python and/or TypeScript with Node.js, and understand asynchronous systems, API design, and data modelling.

You have hands-on experience with function calling, tool use, prompt engineering, and context engineering beyond tutorials or prototypes. You work independently, make sound technical decisions, and can explain those decisions clearly to non-technical colleagues. Professional fluency in both German and English is required.

Responsibilities

Design and develop the LLM platform layer, including the retrieval backend, embedding pipeline, and reliable APIs. Deliver customer-facing features such as a conversational analyst for market and price data, semantic search, and an intelligent alert feed. Integrate foundation models from providers such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mistral, selecting models according to response quality, cost, and latency.

Develop agent architectures and Model Context Protocol (MCP) interfaces that allow enterprise customers to access KI Group data from their own systems. Establish evaluation, grounding, and monitoring practices to measure whether features are reliable and useful. Collaborate with product and business stakeholders to prioritize use cases, gather user feedback, and move promising ideas into production.

Benefits The annual salary range is €55,000–€85,000, with an additional annual bonus. You will work on a recently launched product where your contributions are visible, using proprietary data and software that serve real customers rather than a purely experimental environment. KI Group offers a small international team, flat hierarchies, and short decision-making paths.

Enjoy hybrid working, flexible hours, and an office in Bad Homburg. The company provides a budget for models, tools, and conferences, along with JobRad, JobAuto, JobTicket, occupational pension provision, supplementary company health insurance, and Corporate Benefits. Team events are held at least quarterly.

Equal Opportunity

KI Group welcomes applicants from different backgrounds and is committed to fair, respectful treatment throughout the hiring process. Hiring decisions are based on relevant skills, experience, and the ability to contribute to the role. We encourage qualified candidates to apply and help us build useful, responsible AI products for our customers.