Staff Engineer (gn) - Data & AI Focus
Start: Immediately | Level: Staff | Location: remote, Germany | Working Hours: Full Time (40h/week)
Your next step in the Tech & Engineering team at ESN & More.
As Staff Engineer (gn) – AI Enablement , you will close the gap between AI potential and engineering reality. We have the platform, the tools, and the ambition – what we need is the person who sees where AI is changing how we build, drives that change without being asked, and makes it stick across teams. You work hands-on across our engineering organisation – enabling engineers to think and build with AI, leading our AI Community of Practice, and accelerating the shift to agent-driven workflows.
This is not a consulting role and it's not a ticket queue. You don't wait to be pointed at a problem. You find it, frame it, and start moving.
If you thrive on proactively identifying opportunities, moving teams forward through expertise rather than authority, and turning AI from a tool into a fundamental shift in how engineering works – this role is for you.
To ensure smooth collaboration, we require a current primary residence in Germany for this position.
Your mission
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You identify AI opportunities across engineering before they appear on anyone's roadmap – and you drive them forward proactively, with or without a formal mandate
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You lead our AI Community of Practice: you own the format, the cadence, the reusable playbooks and prompt libraries, and you measure whether engineers are actually working differently because of it
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You accelerate the shift to agentic engineering by working hands-on with Claude Code, Codex, and n8n – building prototypes, sharing patterns, and helping teams move from AI-assisted to AI-driven workflows
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You build reusable frameworks and experiment templates that multiply your impact: guides, decision frameworks, and best practices others can follow and improve on without needing you in the room
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You co-shape AI strategy together with the Heads of Engineering and VP of Engineering – you are a key voice grounded in what's technically feasible and what engineers actually need, and you proactively surface the problems worth solving
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You collaborate closely with our Cloud & Security team, which owns our enterprise AI platform (Codex and Claude Code via GDP Enterprise), to enable teams to use it well and to feed back what's missing
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You work as part of a Staff Engineer team with different specialisations – you challenge each other, support across domains, and contribute your AI depth as the specialisation the team is currently missing
Your experience & skills
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You are currently working at Staff level or equivalent and have demonstrable cross-team impact – not just within your own squad
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You have solid, working knowledge of the modern AI toolkit – LLMs, prompt engineering, agentic frameworks, RAG, embeddings, and automation patterns – and you know when and why to use each. You don't need to have built all of it from scratch; you need the judgment to guide others through it and the credibility to be taken seriously when you do
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Your personal AI practice is real: you use tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot not because you have to – because you can't imagine not using them. You've built workflows, pushed the limits, broken things, and learned from it. You can show your work
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You have concrete experience enabling others: workshops, communities, documentation or guides that changed how a team actually works – you've moved people, not just written about moving them
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Communication is one of your strongest skills: you explain complex AI concepts clearly to sceptical senior engineers, overwhelmed teams, and leadership who need the trade-offs without the implementation details
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You know when AI is the wrong answer – you can make the case for keeping something deterministic, for stopping an experiment early, and for separating durable capability from compelling hype
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You run experiments and kill what doesn't w