Lead AI Engineer

Are you interested in building modern AI platforms and looking for a new opportunity in the field? Would you like to develop innovative technology with superb colleagues who are top experts in their fields and work at the interface of research and industry? VTT might be just the place for you. VTT is one of the leading applied research organisations in Europe. What unites us are curiosity, a passion for learning, and a purpose: to solve the biggest challenges of our time and turn them into sustainable growth and well-being. Our cross-disciplinary community of over 2000 brilliant minds from 55+ different nationalities focuses on creating impact through science-based innovation. Get to know us further by exploring VTT's tech & infra. Join us as Lead AI Engineer We are looking for a Lead AI Engineer to join our Research Digital Enablers team. You will lead the development of our AI platform and engineering capabilities. In this role, you will work at the intersection of AI, platform engineering, and research. Your mission is to create technical foundations that allow researchers to develop, deploy, and utilise advanced AI solutions as part of their daily work. You will collaborate closely with researchers, data specialists, platform engineers, and architects to understand evolving needs and transform them into scalable platform capabilities. From AI model deployment and inference services to agentic AI, model governance, and self-service AI environments, you will play a key role in enabling the next generation of research and innovation. Your responsibilities as Lead AI Engineer:

• Own the technical vision, architecture, roadmap and lifecycle of VTT’s shared AI platform.
• Lead the hands-on design and implementation of scalable capabilities for AI development, model deployment and inference across cloud, on-premises and GPU environments.
• Provide governed access to commercial, open-source and private models through AI gateways, shared APIs and reusable platform services.
• Establish platform capabilities and engineering practices for experimentation, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, observability, security and lifecycle management.
• Work continuously with researchers and research leaders to understand scientific workflows and translate diverse use cases into prioritised, reusable platform capabilities.
• Facilitate technical discovery, co-design and onboarding, and help research teams select suitable models, tools and deployment patterns.
• Integrate the AI platform with data platforms, identity and access management, research infrastructures, cloud services and internal developer platforms.
• Define service levels, capacity needs, operational ownership and platform metrics, and use stakeholder feedback and usage data to drive continuous improvement.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and lead proofs of concept and transitions from experimentation to supported services.
• Mentor engineers and researchers and strengthen VTT’s internal AI engineering community.

Who we are looking for:

• You have strong hands-on experience in AI platform engineering, machine learning, cloud-native platform engineering, or software architecture.
• You have built or operated production-grade platforms and understand platform ownership, service lifecycle management and researcher or developer experience.
• You have strong experience with Kubernetes, containers, GPU workloads, cloud or on-premises infrastructure, CI/CD, GitOps and Infrastructure as Code.
• You understand modern model serving and inference.
• You are familiar with AI gateways such as LiteLLM.
• You understand MLOps and LLMOps methods and tools for experiment tracking, model registries, pipelines, evaluation, observability, tracing and governance.
• You have practical knowledge of large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, AI agents, model adaptation and evaluation, together with strong Python and API development skills.
• You can turn varied research requirements into a coherent platform roadmap, explain technical trade-offs and collaborate fluently in English with researchers, engineers, architects, security specialists and leadership stakeholders.

As a person, we hope that you are: A curious and pragmatic technical leader who combines long-term platform thinking with hands-on engineering. You listen carefully to researchers, ask the right questions and identify the shared capability behind different scientific use cases. You take ownership, communicate technical choices clearly and enjoy aligning multidisciplinary stakeholders around solutions that are secure, usable and maintainable. With VTT, you’ll enjoy

• Visionary work in technology. You will shape a strategic AI platform that enables VTT’s researchers to move from experimentation to scalable use and create real, positive impact through science and innovation.
• Fascinating projects and an excellent research environment. You will collaborate with experts across scientific domains, learn from demanding research use cases and turn common needs into reusable capabilities.
• Great career opportunities and superb colleagues. You will have the opportunity to influence architecture, tools and ways of working and to grow an internal community around modern AI engineering.
• Support for your well-being. We nurture strong team spirit and leadership and offer versatile services that support work–life balance, including occupational health care, exercise and culture benefits, hobby clubs and six weeks of paid holiday annually after one year of employment.

Apply now and join our community of brilliant minds! Please send your CV and application with your salary request through our recruitment system as soon as possible, but no later than 17 of November 2026. We will process applications as they come in and may fill the position as soon as we find the right candidate. A security clearance procedure may be conducted during the recruitment process. Interested and want to hear more? For further information, please contact Samuli Immonen, samuli.immonen@vtt.fi, +358407548201 on 5.11. 9-10 or 11.11. 15-16. We look forward to hearing from you! Employment type: Full-time, Permanent VTT VTT is a visionary research, development and innovation partner. We drive sustainable growth and tackle the biggest global challenges of our time and turn them into growth opportunities. We go beyond the obvious to help the society and companies to grow through technological innovations. We have over 75 years of experience of top-level research and science-based results. VTT´s turnover and other operating income is 258 M€. VTT is at the sweet spot where innovation and business come together. VTT – beyond the obvious. Phone: +358 20 722 111 Location: Tekniikantie 21, Espoo Please see our other open positions and read more about us from our career pages.