Senior AI Engineering Lead, South Pole
GDBS
Climate solutions provider
Be an early applicant
Climate solutions provider
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To deliver climate impact at scale.
Role
Who you are
- LLM Engineering: Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs (e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI, or Vertex AI / Gemini) - prompt design, function/tool calling, and structured outputs
- RAG & Retrieval: Practical knowledge of embeddings, chunking, and vector search (pgvector, or a managed vector DB)
- Frameworks: Familiarity with at least one orchestration framework (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent), and comfort working without one when it's simpler
- Evaluation: Awareness of LLM evaluation, hallucination mitigation, and basic red-teaming of AI outputs
- Back-end: Strong Python (FastAPI / Flask / Django), with clean, testable, production-oriented code
- Database: Solid PostgreSQL - comfortable with relations, indices, constraints, and transactions beyond basic ORM usage
- Data: Experience handling large, high-volume datasets and streaming / batch processing
- Cloud: Experience with GCP (Vertex AI, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub) or a comparable cloud platform
- Event-Driven Design: Proficiency with queues and Pub/Sub for asynchronous, event-driven workflows
- DevOps Fundamentals: Working knowledge of CI/CD workflows and containerisation (Docker; Kubernetes a plus)
- Security: Sound practices around authentication, authorisation, throttling, and handling of sensitive and proprietary data in AI workflows.Systems & Cloud-Native Architecture
- Security: Sound practices around authentication, authorisation, throttling, and handling of sensitive and proprietary data in AI workflows
- Proficiency in business English
- Ability to translate complex technical and AI concepts into understandable terms for non-technical business colleagues
Desirable
- Experience with MLOps / model lifecycle tooling, or fine-tuning
- Exposure to front-end work (React / Next.js) for AI-facing interfaces
- Interest in climate, carbon markets, or sustainability data
- Proactive Communicator: You are proactive and communicative. In interviews you prefer a conversational approach - walking us through your reasoning and the trade-offs behind your tech choices, rather than just providing the “correct” answer
- Pragmatic Problem Solver: You don't just make a model work once; you find the root cause, build for reliability, and know when a simpler, non-AI solution is the right one
- Independent: You can take a high-level requirement and turn it into a fully functional, tested, evaluated feature with minimal oversight
- Responsible by Default: You care about accuracy, safety, cost, and the trustworthiness of what you ship - a natural fit for a climate company where credibility matters
What the job involves
- South Pole is looking for an AI Developer to help build the intelligent layer behind our products
- You will design, build, and ship production-grade AI features: LLM-powered workflows, retrieval pipelines, and agentic tooling that turn large, messy environmental and carbon-market data into reliable answers
- This is a hands-on engineering role pitched at a medior-to-senior level
- We are open to a strong medior developer ready to step up, as well as a senior who can take a vague requirement and turn it into a tested, well-reasoned feature
- What matters is that you understand the why behind your choices - not just how to call an API, but when not to, and how to keep an AI system trustworthy, evaluated, and cost-aware in production
- AI Feature Development: Design and ship LLM-powered features end to end - retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), structured extraction, summarisation, and agentic / tool-using workflows
- Pipelines & Integration: Build robust data and inference pipelines that connect our AI layer to product back-ends, vector stores, and source systems (AQ, Salesforce, Google Workspace)
- Evaluation & Reliability: Stand up evaluation, monitoring, and guardrails so AI features are measurably accurate, safe, and stable - not just impressive in a demo
- Performance & Cost: Optimise latency, token usage, and throughput; apply caching, batching, and model-routing to keep large workloads fast and economical
- Quality Assurance: Champion rigorous testing and pull-request discipline to prevent regressions and keep deployments stable
- Collaboration: Partner with the Tech Lead and product owners to translate business problems into AI solutions, and flag where a non-AI approach is the better call
Our take
South Pole is a Zurich-based climate solutions provider making real strides in the global push for Net Zero. Founded in 2006, the company takes a hands-on, action-first approach. Unlike traditional consultancies, South Pole joins projects after they're greenlit, focusing on implementing tangible climate solutions rather than just advising on them. This model has made it a key player in the green transition, turning climate ambitions into real outcomes.
Working across emission reduction, climate, and environmental protection, South Pole partners with companies to help create ways to lower their carbon emissions. While some players in the space struggle to deliver results, South Pole has built a strong track record of success. From partnering with Canadian delivery company Sendle to roll out carbon-neutral shipping, to developing impactful sustainability initiatives with global giants like Nestlé and UBS. And this impact has led to to becoming a Unicorn company.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
31% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- Work-life balance: From flexible working hours to flexible workplace (home office), with above-average vacation allowances, we strive to make the work and family life puzzle an easy one for our employees
- Flexible Vacation Benefits: Options to buy up to 5 extra days of time off
- Life Insurance: Available to all employees across the world
- Care for your Wellbeing: Access to mental, physical and financial wellbeing support through our Employee Assistance Program (TELUS Health)
- Parental Leave: Should any of our employees need to take time off the Iceberg as a result of a new addition to their household, we are happy to be able to offer competitive Paid Parental leave to support them during this time
- Compassionate Leave: Sometimes life is unpredictable, and when unfortunate events occur, we want to give you peace of mind so you feel fully supported during this time
Company HQ
Escher Wyss, Zürich, ZH
Leadership
Nadia Kaddouri
(CEO)Former Board Member at the UN Global Compact Network Switzerland & Liechtenstein, and Chief Strategy and Sustainability Officer at Swissport.
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