Artificial Intelligence Engineer
Pubblicato il 18-09-2026 - TEF - Tech Europe Foundation in Milano
Company Description Tech Europe Foundation is a European non-profit infrastructure built to translate scientific excellence into Deep Tech ventures. Backed by Bocconi, Politecnico di Milano, ION Foundation, FSI and the Milan Chamber of Commerce, TEF operates across three entities: TEF Foundation (ecosystem building), TEF Bridge (real estate and startup consulting) and TEF Fund (pre-seed and seed investments), and is currently scaling toward 1,000 startups/year and €1bn raised by 2030.
Role Description The researchers and founders in our programs already use AI daily, almost always alone and by trial and error. We are hiring an AI Engineer to work on this from the inside: embedding with a research group or a startup team, learning how they work, and building the AI workflows and tooling that can measurably improve their experience.
The same person will build TEF's own internal AI workflows. We want to be the first testers of what we recommend to others, so a substantial share of the role is dedicated to automating and instrumenting how the Foundation itself operates, especially in the initial phase.
This is a technical role. Most of your time goes to designing agentic workflows, wiring integrations, building reusable components and instrumenting them. But you will also teach what you build, work inside teams of scientists and founders who are expert in their domains, and be measured on whether people keep using your work.
You'll work closely with the Venture and Data pods, with senior scientific and technical direction available when needed, and real autonomy over how the work gets done.
Contract type : Fixed-term, 6 months.
At the end of the period, there may be opportunities for a longer-term collaboration depending on how the project develops.
What you'll do
- Build AI workflows for research groups and startups . This is the core of the job: map how teams works today, then design,
ship and iterate on agentic workflows and integrations around their tasks or organizations;
- Build TEF's internal AI workflows . Automate and instrument the Foundation's own operations across programs, data and venture work;
- Instrument everything you deploy . Set up the telemetry and evaluation that show what is actually used, what it produces, and what it costs;
- Teach and hand over . Run hands-on sessions, document your work, and help defining who maintains each workflow after you move to the next team;
- Grow a reusable library . Turn each engagement into shared integrations, templates, prompts and configuration so the next one is faster.
What we look for
- Hands-on experience building agentic AI systems: tool use, context and configuration management, evaluation, telemetry
- Solid engineering fundamentals: Python, version control, APIs, environments, logging
- Ability to teach non-engineers and to work inside someone else's team, with the credibility to be trusted by researchers and founders
- Self-sufficient operator with excellent English; Italian is an advantage
Nice to have : a research background (PhD or research experience in industry) and familiarity with how labs operate; experience in a forward-deployed, solutions or consulting engineering role; exposure to self-hosted or open-weight model deployments; experience working with early-stage startups. Why join us?
? Shape a capability from scratch . This is TEF's first hire of its kind. You'll define how a European deep tech ecosystem puts AI to work in research and company building, and impact tens of startups and research groups.
? Unusual access . You'll work across a portfolio of research groups and deep tech startups, seeing how dozens of teams really operate from the inside.
? New ground, openly shared . Nobody has good answers here yet. We intend to publish what we learn, and you'll be the one who learned it.