Application Engineer

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

About The Company KI Group delivers data-driven market intelligence and decision support for businesses across Europe and beyond. What began in 1971 as KI – Kunststoff Information, a specialist information service for the plastics industry, has grown into a technology company combining industry expertise, journalism, software development, and data analysis.

Our platforms provide market data, price indices, and analysis to decision-makers in the plastics, chemicals, automotive, and pharmaceutical industries. We cover topics including commodity prices, supply chains, freight rates, energy, and raw materials, turning complex information into clear, comparable insights that support business decisions. With our mix of SaaS, data intelligence, and specialist reporting, we help customers make informed choices throughout global value chains.

Our recently launched pricenxt platform brings this expertise and proprietary market data to a new SaaS experience for pricing and market intelligence. We are now building its AI capabilities to help customers explore information, identify relevant developments, and act with greater confidence.

About The Role As a (Senior) LLM Application Engineer, you will own the development of KI Group’s LLM platform and take AI features from initial concept through production. You will begin by building capabilities for pricenxt customers, working with valuable proprietary data and receiving feedback from paying users from day one. As the platform develops, your work will also support internal tools for our editorial and sales teams.

This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who has already delivered an LLM feature to production and wants to shape how practical AI is applied in a real business environment. You will make technical decisions, collaborate across disciplines, and help determine which use cases deliver measurable value.

Qualifications

• Several years of professional experience as a software engineer, including at least one LLM-powered feature that you personally brought into production and that real users have adopted.
• Practical production experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), including vector databases, retrieval, chunking, evaluation, and grounding.
• Strong backend development skills in Python and/or TypeScript with Node.js, including services, asynchronous programming, API design, and data modeling.
• Hands-on experience with function calling, tool use, and prompt and context engineering.
• The ability to work independently, make sound technical decisions, and explain them clearly to non-technical colleagues.
• Excellent German and English communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Build the core LLM platform layer, including the retrieval backend, embedding pipeline, and reliable, well-designed APIs.
• Develop and launch AI features such as a conversational analyst for pricing data, semantic search, and an intelligent alert feed.
• Integrate foundation models from providers such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mistral, selecting models based on quality, cost, and latency.
• Design agent architectures and MCP interfaces that allow enterprise customers to access KI Group data in their own systems.
• Evaluate potential use cases and help decide which solutions are ready for production.
• Establish evaluation, grounding, and monitoring practices to measure performance, reliability, and user value.
• Work closely with product and business colleagues to translate customer needs and feedback into useful software.

Benefits

• Annual salary of €55,000–€85,000, plus an annual bonus.
• Meaningful work with proprietary data, a newly launched product, and real users—not experimental projects without an audience.
• A small, international team with flat hierarchies and short decision-making paths.
• Hybrid working, flexible hours, and an office in Bad Homburg.
• A budget for models, tools, and conferences.
• JobRad, JobAuto, JobTicket, company pension contributions, and supplementary health insurance.
• Corporate benefits and at least one team event each quarter.

Equal Opportunity KI Group is committed to providing an inclusive and respectful workplace. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and make employment decisions based on relevant skills, experience, and potential. We do not discriminate on the basis of characteristics protected by applicable law.