Tech Lead, RAG & Knowledge Ingestion

Job Description

Defining how AI and finance work together — securely, intelligently, and at scale.

We at Unique AI are building a highly secure generative AI platform, tailored for the financial sector. Utilizing GPT technology, we aim to revolutionize how enterprises manage their workload by offering automated solutions. Our mission is to simplify and optimize business interactions, negotiations, and partnerships in the finance sector. We offer an inclusive environment at Unique and we encourage all genders and all neuro-diversities to apply.

We're building an enterprise AI platform where knowledge ingestion is a foundational capability. It is how customer documents, files, and unstructured data enter the system so that AI assistants can search, retrieve, and reason over it.

We're looking for a backend-focused tech lead to own the technical direction of this platform end to end. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will set architecture, guide implementation across the core ingestion services, mentor engineers through design and code review, and drive improvements in reliability, throughput, retrieval quality, and maintainability.

Job Requirements

* 7+ years of backend engineering experience with strong expertise in TypeScript and Node.js

* Experience as a technical lead for a backend or platform domain, with ownership of architecture, technical direction, and mentoring

* Strong experience building ingestion or unstructured data pipelines, ideally involving document parsing across formats such as PDF, Office documents, HTML, or email

* Strong database, indexing, and retrieval experience across PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Qdrant, or similar systems

* Experience improving retrieval quality in production using embeddings, vector search, or RAG-style retrieval systems

* System design maturity: you can design for scale, failure handling, service boundaries, and pragmatic trade-offs under real constraints

* Multi-tenant SaaS experience: you understand data isolation, tenant-scoped processing, and enterprise security requirements

Job Responsibilities

* Technical leadership: Define and own the RAG platform’s architecture and standards, make trade-offed design decisions, drive high-impact backend improvements across the pipeline, and communicate a clear technical roadmap.

* Hands-on backend engineering: Build and evolve ingestion, processing, and retrieval services/APIs, strengthen async pipelines (RabbitMQ, retries, backpressure), enhance parsers, and optimize indexing on Qdrant/Elasticsearch for quality and latency.

* Retrieval and document intelligence: Partner with AI engineers to advance chunking, embeddings, metadata, and RAG patterns; integrate Python services for agentic workflows; improve retrieval via better indexing/enrichment/evaluation and adopt OCR/layout/table extraction when it moves the needle.

* Technical leadership for the team: Mentor and unblock engineers through reviews and pairing, elevate reliability/performance/observability/testing, and support hiring and onboarding without primary people-management duties.

* Platform ownership: Run production delivery via Helm/Kubernetes and ArgoCD GitOps, enhance observability with OpenTelemetry/Prometheus/logging/alerts, and enforce multi-tenant data isolation, security, and auditability end to end.

Job Benefits

* Leading Company 💪 A chance to be part of a leading company in a rapidly evolving industry

* Innovative & Impactful Projects 🚀 Engage in groundbreaking projects within the Generative AI space. Contribute towards building the foundations enabling financial institutions to operationalize AI.

* Ownership & Autonomy 🧠 We care about outcomes and the right solution crafted with clean code

* Continuous Learning 🔄 AI is moving fast and we value engineers who keep learning and experimenting

* Culture 🌿 A modern company with flat hierarchies that focuses on a people-oriented culture and places great emphasis on transparency and open communication

* Hybrid set up 🧑 💻🏢 Based in Berlin with flexibility for remote days