AI Engineer

Join our Data & Analytics team at Crypto Finance, headquartered in the Prime Tower in Zurich. Your primary mandate is pushing the company’s AI strategy forward: identifying use cases across departments, engineering production-grade AI and automation solutions, and helping to build the firm's AI governance practice. You will also contribute to the data platform that underpins Finance, Operations, and Risk reporting, since AI work at our company sits directly on top of that platform.
This is a hybrid role for someone who is equally comfortable in a stakeholder workshop and an IDE. The work potentially spans AI agents and copilots, deterministic automation, RAG systems, and the data infrastructure they rely on. You will be expected to push back on bad use cases as much as you ship good ones.
What you will do:
AI & Automation Engineering

• Work with stakeholders across Compliance, Trading, Operations, Legal, Sales, and Finance to identify, scope, and prioritize use cases that genuinely move the needle.

• Engineer production data solutions: Deterministic automations, AI agents, RAG systems over internal documents, structured extraction pipelines.

• Build the firm's "innovation lab" environment where new use cases can be prototyped and evaluated.

• Maintain prompt and skill libraries as reusable, version-controlled assets, not as one-off scripts.
AI Governance and Inventory

• Maintain the firm-wide inventory of AI systems and use cases, including those built outside D&A.

• Run the operational side of the company’s AI approval process: documentation, risk classification, model cards, evaluation artifacts. Policy is set at the executive level; you make sure the operational practice meets it.

• Conduct technical review of new AI initiatives proposed elsewhere in the company; advise on scope, risk, and design choices.
Data Engineering and Platform

• Contribute to ELT pipelines on the Dagster + SQLMesh + dlt stack, primarily where AI & automation use cases require new data sources or transformations.

• Build the data substrate that AI workloads consume; feature views, document indexes, and structured event tables.

• Maintain infrastructure as code in Git with proper review and deployment standards.

Requirements

• 3–6 years of relevant experience. We are flexible on title, could be AI engineer, analytics engineer with AI focus, or data engineer who is pivoted to AI. What matters is shipped work.

• Demonstrable production experience with LLM applications: at minimum structured extraction with LLMs, and agentic patterns (tool use, multi-step workflows). You can describe what failed and what you learned.

• Strong Python; comfortable building production ready code, not just notebooks.

• Working knowledge of evaluation discipline for LLM applications (eval sets, regression tests, observability), conceptual understanding of retrieval, and how to handle hallucination.

• Familiarity with at least one orchestrator (Dagster, Airflow, Prefect) and one transformation framework (SQLMesh, dbt).

• Solid SQL (window functions, joins, query design).

• Cloud experience, ideally GCP and BigQuery.

• Genuine curiosity about regulated environments and the discipline they require.

• Professional proficiency in English (German is a plus).

• Eligibility to work in Switzerland (Swiss permit or EU/EFTA citizenship).
Equally important is how you think:

• You reach for the simplest thing that works. Boring SQL before vector search. Rules before agents. You can explain why.

• You are comfortable saying "this is not an AI problem" when the right answer is a dashboard, a process fix, or a deterministic script.

• You can run a stakeholder workshop and write production code in the same week.

• You take documentation, evaluation, and audit trails seriously, not as overhead.
Nice to have:

• Prior exposure to regulated financial services, crypto, or comparable model-risk environments.
What we are not looking for:

• "Prompt engineers" with no production experience.

• Pure data engineers using this posting to pivot into AI without prior LLM work.

• Strategists or generalist "AI enthusiasts." This is a builder role.
Benefits

• Be part of an international, fast-paced blockchain and fintech team led by experienced professionals

• Shape the future of finance while working at the cutting edge of B2B digital asset solutions

• Contribute to a collaborative, entrepreneurial culture with flat hierarchies

• Take on meaningful responsibility with room for learning and professional growth

• Gain deep industry insights and make a tangible impact

• Join regular company-wide meetings, knowledge-sharing sessions, and team events

• Enjoy a modern and central workplace in Zurich with top-tier infrastructure

Our culture
At the heart of our company, we prioritize:

• Innovation and Continuous Learning

• Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

• Entrepreneurial Spirit and Flat Hierarchies

• Values such as Excellence, Delivery, Ownership, Passion, and Unity

Please note:

• We do not accept CVs from recruiting or staffing agencies.

• Due to the Swiss/German labor legislation, we can only accept applicants who have the right to work in Switzerland or Germany (are in possession of a Swiss/German work permit or are EU/EFTA citizens). All other applications will not be considered.

• If this is the position for you, and you have a Swiss/German work permit and/or EU citizenship, please send us your complete application, incl. cover letter, CV, and references.
Find more English Speaking Jobs in Switzerland on Arbeitnow

Source: Arbeitnow (https://www.arbeitnow.ch/jobs/companies/crypto-finance/ai-engineer-zurich-3216)