Senior AI/ML Engineer

At bol, we handle a lot of customer service cases, most of which are resolved via our call center. Customers prefer self-service, and enabling this could make life of our customers significantly easier. We believe Agentic AI, combined with robust business process management, can transform these workflows by autonomously resolving cases, complying with policies, and delivering personalized responses. This is a pioneering opportunity to apply cutting-edge AI at scale in retail, creating structural impact and redefining customer experience.

How do you make our customers happy?

Automate services for customers in the coolest, most reliable, best possible way.

The biggest challenge

Automating processes for customer service by combining AI usage and workflow processes in a fast-changing environment with a strong focus on happy customers. While building reliable solutions you’ll foster trust, using best practices, and balance innovation speed with bol’s high standards for security, compliance, and architectural integrity. You operate in a domain where technology, policies, and expectations shift quickly. This requires curiosity, flexibility, and a mindset focused on establishing structure where there currently is none.

What you’ll do

We are seeking an experienced AI/ML Engineer to join our Core Service department. Working in our team, you can really make an impact on our customers as we are talking with them, every day.

You, and the team you’ll work with, will be responsible for designing and implementing the automated workflows to solve customer problems, integrating Agentic AI in combination with policies and procedures improvements. This will create the framework and core guidelines for future scalability, which also means you’ll possess great communication skills, able to present learnings to others, share best practices, and coach/mentor other team members.

We expect you to be an experienced AI/ML Engineer, already having seen millions of lines of code. Next to that we expect someone that has an open engineering mind, making their decisions based on programming’s best practices. As a Senior Engineer you should have good understanding of system design, system architecture, distributed systems, AI evaluation models, design patterns and integration patterns, and keep security in the back of your mind when developing new models.

Technology/experience needed:

• Strong Python skills & hands-on experience with LLMs and GenAI (e.g. Google GenAI/Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source models via Hugging Face), including prompting, fine-tuning or adapter-based methods. We are framework-agnostic; experience with any major ML/LLM framework is welcome, none is a hard requirement.
• Practical knowledge of RAG / grounding: embeddings, vector databases (e.g. Pinecone, ChromaDB, Weaviate, Qdrant, pgvector etc.) and retrieval pipelines for question-answering use cases.
• Familiarity with agent frameworks (Google agentic frameworks such as Google ADK / Vertex AI Agent Builder, or equivalent frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex)).
• Experience with the full model lifecycle, including dataset preparation, training pipelines, offline/online evaluation, deployment strategies, model registry, automated retraining, rollback, and retirement of production models.
• Experience monitoring production ML/LLM systems for quality, safety, and reliability, including drift, data quality, retrieval effectiveness, hallucination/groundedness, latency, throughput, failures, cost, and guardrail effectiveness such as input/output filtering, policy enforcement, fallback handling, and human-in-the-loop escalation where needed.
• Experience deploying models and LLM-backed services to production (e.g. Docker, cloud platforms, CI/CD), and exposing them via APIs (FastAPI, REST/gRPC). GCP experience is a strong plus (e.g. Vertex AI, Cloud Run, GKE), but experience with other major clouds is also valued.

Why you can make difference

You combine AI or ML engineering experience with a solid software engineering foundation. You’ve worked hands-on with cloud platforms (preferably GCP) before and understand the complexity and pitfalls of reliable and secure automation. Familiarity with NotebookLM, Agentspace, or similar collaborative AI environments is a plus. Beyond the technical, you truly care about customer and user impact, enjoy collaborating with cross-functional teams, and have a knack for explaining technical concepts lucidly.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

You like to only be told what to do, instead of challenging yourself with thinking of improvements.

• No, if you rather be comfortable with only taking the next task assigned to you.

Being adaptable is not fun for you.

• No, if you rather stay within your comfort zone.

Speed comes before quality for you.

• No, if you just want to get things done and get frustrated with thinking things through before jumping into the code.

Solid engineering experience.

• Yes, if you have a solid software engineering background and have delivered enterprise applications of great quality.

You love solving problems.

• Yes, if you like diving into code, logs and data to find why situations are the way they are and orient yourself towards solutions.

Constant improvement is in your DNA.

• Yes, if you can’t relax when you see something that could be done better being overlooked and you’re not afraid to share your ideas and feedback.

This is where you’ll work

Core Service

At the leading e-commerce tech platform in the Netherlands and Belgium. Bol is where 13 million customers shop and 49,000 partners sell. Our Core Service domain is essential to supporting and innovating the after sales journey. Our innovation belief is that every customer should be able to solve every question through self service, but human assistance should never be more than one click away. With a team of over 60 engineers, product analysts, designers and product managers, we work every day to minimize the service effort of our customers.

Next to the hard work there’s also room for fun. With the occasional board game lunches with colleagues or the fun events organized by our department there’s enough to do to get to know your colleagues on a more personal level as well.