Applied AI Specialist

Job description

Riverflex is a global team of consultants focused on helping leaders drive intelligent transformation through strategy and transformation consulting, talent services, and AI products.

Riverflex works with C-level leaders at blue-chip companies on critical programmes and is growing its Applied AI practice to meet rising market demand. Riverflex is looking for an Applied AI Specialist to work hands-on inside the Applied AI consulting team.

Your role as Applied AI Specialist

You'll be an AI Business Specialist in our consulting practice, working at the intersection of business, product, and technology. You will walk into a client's finance, operations, customer experience, or sales function, understand how work actually gets done today, and help redesign it around AI primitives such as skills, memory, plugins, connectors, harnesses, and agents.

You will be strong on the commercial and innovation side, with enough technical literacy to prototype your own solutions using AI-assisted tools and no-code platforms by wiring up connectors, drafting specifications, and testing what works before handing it to engineering to harden. The role is about translating between what a customer actually needs and what the AI system has to look like to deliver it. This is not an AI engineer role, not a strategy slide-deck role, and not a team-management role. Your job is to bring deep specialist craft and ship things.

What you’ll do

Four core mandates, roughly equal weight in year one.

1. Lead Applied AI workstreams on flagship engagements with major European retailers and financial services clients. Run discovery, help design the AI Operating System for the function in scope, and ship the first wave of skills, agents, and integrations alongside the client team. Focus on measurable productivity uplift and redesigned workflows.
2. Help implement AI internally at Riverflex by redesigning ways of working around AI, contributing to the internal AI capability platform and delivery process, and creating reusable IP that can later be deployed with clients.
3. Raise the craft level of the Applied AI consulting team through specialist expertise, contribution to client engagements, internal labs, and capability sessions; coach colleagues through real work; and add what you build to the reusable library.
4. Support the development of AI coaching and change propositions by building materials, running early engagements, and feeding learnings back into the offer, with a focus on workflow integration as the main driver of AI value.

Who you are

The hard requirements

• 5+ years of consulting, transformation, change, product, or operating-model work in a boutique, MBB, Big 4 advisory, in-house transformation setting, or a strong product or operations role at a tech-forward company.
• Demonstrated ability to walk into a function, model how work gets done today, and redesign it.
• Hands-on experience developing and deploying applications with Claude Code, Cursor, or other AI-powered IDEs, with a solid understanding of how things are built and distributed to real users.
• Tech-savvy enough to prototype independently with an experimental mindset: you understand software at a conceptual level, including APIs, webhooks, and data models, and you're confident using AI-assisted tools and no-code platforms to build skills, plugins, or connectors.
• Working understanding of LLM primitives such as context windows, memory, tools, agents, and evaluation, as well as awareness of current deployment bottlenecks. We will train you on the rest.
• Knowing when AI is the right tool for the job, and when it isn't, including when to lean on a coding agent versus building something yourself.
• Strong client presence, with confidence running discovery sessions and demos with director-level stakeholders.
• A curious, always-learning mindset and genuine interest in following AI and technology trends and tooling.

What earns extra points

• Have shipped a non-technical builder programme, an internal AI tool, or an AI-driven workflow change inside an organisation.
• Have a public GitHub showing real work and/or an active social presence around AI through posts, projects, or building in public.
• Experience designing change around AI specifically, not generic digital transformation.
• Existing footprint in the Anthropic, Claude, OpenAI, or Databricks ecosystems.
• Domain experience in retail, financial services, or consumer sectors.
• A genuine builder instinct: you tinker, ship side projects, and have an opinion on how AI tools should actually be set up.
• Dutch language skills are a bonus, not a requirement.

What we offer

• 25 days off per year, plus a full week off between Christmas and New Year.
• Flexible work from abroad for up to 6 weeks per year.
• Pension scheme to help you plan for your future.
• Learning & Development budget, including full access to all Coursera courses.
• ClassPass membership.
• Access to the latest tools: ChatGPT Pro, Claude, Notion, SlideHub, and Riverflex's in-house developed software.
• Equity share scheme for long-term team members.
• A clear path to Director with profit-share upside.

Why join now?

Riverflex is growing its Applied AI practice at the exact moment enterprise demand is moving from pilot to production. The clients are real, the mandates are live, and the practice is being built now, not inherited. You'll step in with direct exposure to working with Anthropic and Databricks, founder-level coaching, and the autonomy to shape how AI actually lands inside major European organisations.