Senior AI Engineer

Syensqo is all about chemistry. We're not just referring to chemical reactions here, but also to the magic that occurs when the brightest minds get to work together. This is where our true strength lies. In you. In your future colleagues and in all your differences. And of course, in your ideas to improve lives while preserving our planet's beauty for the generations to come.

Job title

• - Senior AI Engineer

Job Overview And Responsibilities
Syensqo is a leading multinational materials company headquartered in Brussels, advancing humanity through scientific exploration and innovation. Nearly two years after the spin-off from Solvay, has evolved from inception to a nimble, high-impact scale-up that accelerates AI adoption across the Group—partnering closely with corporate functions (e.g., Finance, HR, Legal, Procurement), operations, and our chemists and researchers.

We operate lean and fast, with a startup mindset and strong governance: deliver impact quickly, build responsibly, and meet enterprise standards for security, compliance, ethics, and guardrails. As a
Senior AI Engineer
, you will design, build, and productionize agentic and generative AI solutions on Azure, with a focus on real business outcomes, reproducibility, and maintainability (MLOps).

The Senior AI Engineer will co-lead the planning, execution, and delivery of AI proofs-of-value and products, ensuring they solve concrete business problems and can scale across Syensqo. You will collaborate directly with stakeholders, guide technical decisions, and help shape patterns and standards for agentic AI within the enterprise.

The position reports to the Data Science Lead.
Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the end-to-end design, implementation, and deployment of agentic and generative AI solutions (tool-using LLMs, function calling, multi-step workflows) that integrate with enterprise systems and data.
• Architect RAG pipelines (retrieval, indexing, chunking, routing, safety filters, evaluation) using Azure services (e.g., Azure AI Search, Azure OpenAI / Azure AI Foundry, Azure Machine Learning) and modern frameworks.
• Own fine-tuning and adaptation (e.g., LoRA/PEFT, instruction tuning, prompt optimization) and establish offline/online evaluation strategies (hallucination, safety, latency, cost).
• Drive MLOps on Azure: CI/CD for prompts and models, model/data/versioning, telemetry, guardrails, rollback strategies, canary releases, monitoring, and cost governance.
• Serve as a technical authority on Azure (Azure ML, Azure DevOps, Azure Functions, Microsoft Fabric, Azure AI/OpenAI, Azure AI Search; familiarity with AKS/Container Apps is a plus).
• Work side-by-side with business stakeholders in corporate functions and R&I to frame use cases, define success metrics, and deliver measurable value.
• Champion Responsible AI: privacy, security, compliance, ethical use, and documentation across the lifecycle.
• Mentor engineers/scientists, share best practices, and contribute reusable components, templates, and reference architectures.
• Promote adoption through demos, workshops, and concise internal write-ups; stay current on GenAI/agentic research and bring relevant advances into production.
• (Optional, valued) Contribute to initiatives involving chemistry/materials datasets and domain-specific tooling.

Education And Experience

• Education: Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field — or equivalent practical experience. Background in Chemistry/Cheminformatics is a plus.

• Experience:

• Solid hands-on experience delivering production AI/GenAI solutions (tenure flexible; we value demonstrated capability over years).

• Proven track record building agentic LLM systems (tool use/function calling, orchestration, safety), RAG pipelines, and fine-tuning/adaptation.
• Experience working with corporate business functions (e.g., Finance, HR, Legal, Procurement) and/or R&I stakeholders.
• Demonstrated MLOps implementation on Microsoft Azure.
• Open-source contributions, internal frameworks, or published case studies are a strong plus.

Technical Knowledge:

• Python expertise; proficiency with ML/LLM stacks (PyTorch; scikit-learn; Transformers).
• LLM/agent frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel (or equivalents).
• Azure services: Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI / Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Search, Azure Data Factory, Azure DevOps, Microsoft Fabric; containers (Docker; AKS/Container Apps).
• Data engineering fundamentals: SQL/NoSQL, ETL/ELT, APIs/eventing, and secure cloud data integration.
• Familiarity with chemistry/cheminformatics data and tools is a plus.

Skills And Behavioral Competencies

• Startup mindset & ownership: proactive, resourceful, bias to action, comfortable with ambiguity, drives ideas to value.
• Technical leadership: sets architecture, makes pragmatic trade-offs (quality, cost, latency), mentors peers.
• Business impact orientation: frames problems with stakeholders, defines KPIs, measures value, iterates quickly.
• Curiosity & craftsmanship: keeps pace with GenAI/agentic advances; evaluates and integrates what truly works.
• Communication & evangelism: explains complex topics clearly to non-technical audiences; runs workshops/demos.
• Collaboration & knowledge sharing: reusable components, patterns, docs; uplifts team capabilities.
• Responsible AI: builds with security, privacy, and compliance by design.

Language Skills

• English (mandatory)
• French (nice to have

What's In It For The Candidate

• Be part of — and contribute to — a once-in-a-lifetime transformation at Syensqo: small, empowered team; direct line of sight to impact; modern Azure stack; autonomy to ship meaningful AI products used across the Group.

About Us

• Syensqo is a science company developing groundbreaking solutions that enhance the way we live, work, travel and play. Inspired by the scientific councils which Ernest Solvay initiated in 1911, we bring great minds together to push the limits of science and innovation for the benefit of our customers, with a diverse, global team of more than 13,000 associates. Our solutions contribute to safer, cleaner, and more sustainable products found in homes, food and consumer goods, planes, cars, batteries, smart devices and health care applications. Our innovation power enables us to deliver on the ambition of a circular economy and explore breakthrough technologies that advance humanity.
• At Syensqo, we seek to promote unity and not uniformity. We value the diversity that individuals bring and we invite you to consider a future with us, regardless of background, age, gender, national origin, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, ability or identity. We encourage individuals who may require any assistance or accommodations to let us know to ensure a seamless application experience. We are here to support you throughout the application journey and want to ensure all candidates are treated equally. If you are unsure whether you meet all the criteria or qualifications listed in the job description, we still encourage you to apply.

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