Ai Tech Lead

Job Purpose

The role is aimed at providing hands-on technical leadership to MSC’s internal AI engineering team, setting the technical direction for the team’s work while continuing to contribute directly to the code.

Key Accountabilities

• Lead the technical direction of the team’s work, including design discussions, code review and the day-to-day technical decisions that keep delivery moving.  
• Contribute hands-on across flagship AI use cases in customer experience, revenue and operations: multi-agent orchestration, RAG pipelines, tool-calling agents, streaming and the production engineering around them.  
• Apply and uphold MSC’s standards for production AI, including testing, LLM evaluation, observability, latency and cost discipline.  
• Monitor AI quality — retrieval performance, regression detection and grounded evaluation — to ensure systems perform reliably in production.  
• Mentor and coach mid-level and junior engineers in both technical craft and career development.  
• Support a healthy developer experience across MSC’s AI platform: CI gates, deployment pipelines and the path from prototype to per-tenant production.  
• Make technical decisions within the agreed reference architecture, and escalate cross-system decisions where required.  
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, partners and vendors to translate requirements into working systems.  
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of MSC’s AI engineering practice.  

Qualifications

• English and Italian as primary working languages.  
• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics or related fields.  
• 5+ years building production software, including some experience leading or mentoring other engineers.  
• A current, hands-on engineering practice — having shipped code in the past twelve months and intending to keep shipping.  
• Strong Python.  
• Experience with LLM orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain or comparable), including multi-agent design, tool calling, structured outputs and streaming.  
• Solid RAG engineering: vector stores (RediSearch, pgvector or similar), embedding models, retrieval and reranking patterns, and the discipline to measure retrieval quality rather than assume it.  
• Familiarity with LLM observability and evaluation in production: tracing platforms (Langfuse or similar) and LLM-as-judge or custom evaluators.  
• Cloud and platform experience: at least one major cloud (Azure preferred — Azure OpenAI, AKS, Key Vault, ACR), container delivery and modern deployment pipelines.  
• Working comfort with TypeScript and React, enough to collaborate across the frontend boundary.  
• A clear, teachable engineering philosophy covering testing strategy, code review, observability and incident response.  
• Good communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with engineers, stakeholders, partners and vendors.  
• Experience delivering production LLM, RAG or multi-agent systems will be considered an advantage.  
• Experience with Azure OpenAI, Langfuse, DeepEval, Redis Stack / RediSearch, or hybrid edge-cloud AI deployments will be considered an advantage.  
• Exposure to AI governance or regulatory regimes such as the EU AI Act will be considered an advantage.  
• Background in travel, hospitality or another large-scale consumer business will be considered an advantage.

VISA Requirements

Right to work in Italy

What we offer

In compliance with the applicable pay transparency legislation, the following information is provided regarding the initial compensation foreseen for the position.

Contract 
-    Type of contract: Permanent
-    Hybrid working model: 2 days per week remotely
-    Applicable Collective Labour Agreement (CCNL): “Addetti agli uffici ed ai terminals delle società di navigazione che esercitano l’armamento privato” – sez. personale di terra
-    Gross annual salary (RAL): between €50.000 – €57.000 gross per year, paid over 14 monthly installments
-    Meal vouchers: worth €8 per on-site working day
The offer in terms of salary will be determined based on the candidate’s professional experience, technical competencies, and the level of autonomy and responsibility assigned to the role.

Welfare&Wellbeing
We offer a range of Welfare&Wellbeing Initiatives as well as benefits including Productivity award, Health Insurance, Learning opportunities, flexible work hours organization, Employee Assistance Programme, Discounts & Partnerships within the MSC group.

Our commitment

We are committed to building a future that values diverse perspectives, embraces the world beyond borders, and fosters an inclusive environment where every individual feels valued, respected and empowered to be their authentic selves. Our commitment extends to taking meaningful, measurable actions that have a long-term positive impact on our guests, our employees and our planet.

Ready to turn your passion into something extraordinary? Join us at MSC Cruises, where new opportunities await. Apply today to be part of a global team that is pushing boundaries and achieving something remarkable. Your journey starts here!