(Senior) Platform Engineer (m/f/d) | Cloud Native & DevOps

AI ENGINEER / AI ENABLEMENT ENGINEER (M/F/D) Location: Flexible — Hamburg, Berlin ABOUT FREENOW FREENOW empowers smarter mobility decisions, helping people move freely and cities thrive. As Europe’s leading Mobility Super App, we serve more than 54 million users across 16 markets and 170+ cities. AI is becoming core to how we build products, operate the platform, and support our teams. To move from experimentation to real, measurable impact, we are building a central AI Enablement & Evaluation team — and we’re looking for a Senior AI Engineer to help turn AI into a reliable, scalable capability across the company. If you enjoy building AI systems that actually ship, scale, and deliver value — not just demos — this is your next ride 🚕 YOUR MISSION As a Senior AI Engineer, you will sit at the intersection of AI engineering, evaluation, and enablement. Your role is to ensure that AI systems at FREENOW are production-ready, measurable, and safe, while accelerating adoption across product and engineering teams. You will help transform AI from isolated pilots into reusable platforms, tools, and workflows used across the organization. YOUR DAILY ADVENTURES WILL INCLUDE * Designing, building, and maintaining production-grade AI systems using LLMs, agents, and retrieval-based architectures * Owning and evolving the AI Evaluation Framework, including: * multi-turn evaluations * quality, safety, and hallucination metrics * offline and production-data evaluation * Partnering with Product, Engineering, Legal, and Security to ensure AI solutions are compliant, observable, and trustworthy * Supporting and scaling internal AI products such as FreenowGPT and domain-specific AI assistants * Enabling teams through shared tooling, patterns, and best practices (e.g. Gemini enablement, prompt & agent patterns) * Building reusable AI components (RAG pipelines, agent orchestration, model access layers) * Helping define standards for agent-ready architecture (MCP integrations, model abstraction, permissions) * Monitoring AI system performance, cost, and reliability in production * Acting as a technical reference point for AI across squads — from experimentation to rollout OUR AI & TECH STACK Python | LLM APIs (Gemini, OpenAI) | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Databricks | Cloud Infrastructure | APIs & Backend Services Evaluation tooling | Observability & monitoring | Internal developer tooling (Exact tools matter less than strong engineering fundamentals — the stack will evolve.) TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE * You have strong experience as an AI Engineer, ML Engineer, or Senior Software Engineer working with modern AI systems * You’ve built or operated LLM-based systems in production, not just prototypes * You understand the failure modes of LLMs (hallucinations, non-determinism, evaluation challenges) * You consistently balance speed, quality, and pragmatism; knowing when to ship, when to iterate, and when correctness is non-negotiable in production AI systems. * You are comfortable designing evaluation frameworks and defining quality metrics for AI behavior * You have solid backend engineering fundamentals (APIs, services, data access) * You enjoy working across teams and explaining complex AI concepts clearly * You care about reliability, safety, and real business impact, not hype * You are fluent in English NICE TO HAVE * Experience with agentic systems or multi-step workflows * Familiarity with AI governance, risk, or compliance considerations (e.g. GDPR, EU AI Act) * Experience enabling other teams through platforms, SDKs, or internal tools * Prior work in marketplaces, mobility, or large-scale consumer products WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS Most companies experiment with AI. Very few manage to scale it responsibly and profitably. This role is central to: * reducing AI risk in customer-facing systems (support, dispatch, booking), * unlocking company-wide productivity through internal AI products, * and building the technical foundations that allow FREENOW to move fast without breaking trust. You’ll help define how AI is built at FREENOW for years to come. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BENEFITS & PERKS IN A NUTSHELL: * Flexible working arrangements * LinkedIn Learning * Sabbatical & special leave policies * WeRoad partnership * Birthday, 24th + 31st December off * Short term EU work policy * Mobility Credit * Health insurance * Employee assistance program   Plus more local benefits depending on your work location! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION: Freenow is an equal opportunity employer and we consider qualified applicants regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or age. We want you to grow and evolve, bring your true self to work.  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT US: Freenow by Lyft empowers smarter mobility decisions, helping people to move freely and cities to thrive. Through our multi-mobility app, we feature broad options for everyone across 9 European markets and over 180 cities. Millions of passengers can access services including taxis, private hire vehicles, carsharing, car rental, e-scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds, and public transport within a single app.  In July 2025 Freenow was acquired by Lyft, a global mobility platform, which connects riders and drivers for billions of rides across North America and Europe. Together, Freenow and Lyft are creating a more caring and connected world, with transportation for everyone. We are a global, diverse, highly motivated, and collaborative team that strives for excellence and likes to have fun. Ready for your next ride?

Location: Come and join us in Barcelona! We are looking for a talented and motivated Senior Backend Engineer (m/f/d) for our new Driver Onboarding team. As part of a highly skilled, cross-functional team comprising Fullstack Engineers, Backend Engineers, a Product Manager, a Product Designer, a Data Analyst, and a technical Engineering Manager, you will help shape the future of mobility with FREENOW and assist our drivers in their daily work. Our team is the cornerstone of the driver experience, with a core focus on streamlining the driver registration flow and ensuring the integrity of our platform through advanced document validation processes. Our mission is to provide a fast, frictionless, and secure onboarding journey for every new driver. We achieve this by: * Designing and implementing the entire driver registration and onboarding journey, making it simple, intuitive, and fast. * Developing and maintaining robust, automated document validation systems, powered by LLMs and ML models, to ensure compliance and quick approval for drivers. * Collaborating closely with Operations and other engineering teams to constantly optimize process automation within the document lifecycle. * Providing self-service tools that empower drivers to efficiently manage their documentation and account details. * Integrating key insights into internal systems, fostering collaboration across teams to improve the overall driver experience. As a critical part of our company, this team's work directly impacts thousands of drivers and, ultimately, the experiences of millions of customers. Your contributions in this role will have a tangible and far-reaching effect on the lives of many. As an engineer on our team, you will tackle the exciting challenges of building a best-in-class driver onboarding platform. This includes designing and building innovative, high-scale solutions for document validation and workflow automation, directly enhancing the start-to-finish experience for our drivers and ensuring the quality and compliance of our fleet. You'll be involved in every stage of product development, from ideation to implementation, ensuring a seamless and impactful experience. We also value a mindset that challenges the status quo—constantly exploring new technologies and approaches to improve our products and maintain a state-of-the-art codebase. Beyond technical excellence, your contributions will help foster a collaborative and inspiring team culture, making our workplace an enjoyable and fulfilling environment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- YOUR DAILY ADVENTURES WILL INCLUDE: * Own the Feature, Own the Code – feel responsible for what you create. It all starts with bringing in your feature ideas, goes over development, testing and ends in deploying your code and monitoring it. * Design and develop systems based on product requirements or refactorings. * Maintain and improve the existing systems by finding bottlenecks and performance issues and improving resource usage (DB access, cache, messaging, etc.). * Collaborate with your team members in an Agile environment, contribute to and live our agile ceremonies. * You care about teamwork: Be accountable for all topics above, but work together with the team on them. * Stay on top of the latest technology trends and AI-assisted development tools, and bring best practices to our daily work. Our Techstack: Kotlin | Java | AWS | Docker | Git | Kafka | ElasticSearch & more ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE: * Passionate about Kotlin or Java. * Experience with the quirks of Spring Boot or similar frameworks, automated tests and CI/CD tools. * Knowledge of microservices architecture. * Comfortable with AI-first development practices, we use tools like Claude and Cursor daily, so experience or strong interest in AI-assisted coding is important. * Familiarity with monitoring tools (i.e., Grafana, Datadog, Kibana etc.). * Keen about principles and practices of scalable web applications, such as RESTful API’s, dealing with transactions, and resiliency. * Familiar with messaging by using Kafka or RabbitMQ. * High level of creativity; there’s all the freedom to think outside the box. * Be communicative, proactive, and always collaborative. * Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English. Nice to have:  * Experience working with AWS or similar cloud service providers. * Experience in Python, particularly for data processing or AI integration tasks. * Experience with document automation validation. * Familiar with Agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BENEFITS & PERKS IN A NUTSHELL: * Flexible working arrangements * LinkedIn Learning * Sabbatical & special leave policies * WeRoad partnership * Birthday, 24th + 31st December off * Short term EU work policy * Mobility Credit * Health Insurance * Employee assistance program   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION: FREE NOW is an equal opportunity employer and we consider qualified applicants regardless of race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or age. We want you to grow and evolve, bring your true self to work. ABOUT US: Freenow by Lyft empowers smarter mobility decisions, helping people to move freely and cities to thrive. Through our multi-mobility app, we feature broad options for everyone across 9 European markets and over 180 cities. Millions of passengers can access services including taxis, private hire vehicles, carsharing, car rental, e-scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds, and public transport within a single app.  In July 2025 Freenow was acquired by Lyft, a global mobility platform, which connects riders and drivers for billions of rides across North America and Europe. Together, Freenow and Lyft are creating a more caring and connected world, with transportation for everyone. We are a global, diverse, highly motivated, and collaborative team that strives for excellence and likes to have fun. Ready for your next ride? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SEE WHAT OUR AWESOME COLLEAGUES SAY ABOUT US:                 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------