AI Engineer Product Engineer Freelance

Colonies is on a mission to solve housing. We build and manage flexible living spaces across Europe. The tech team is small and high-leverage. We run a hub-and-spoke model: a Core Tech team maintains the platform, while embedded engineers position themselves in business teams to solve problems close to the source. What works gets hardened and scaled. What doesn’t gets killed quickly.

• You have built LLM-powered applications in production — not just prototypes. You know how to handle hallucinations, edge cases, and the gap between demo and reliable system.
• You are strong in Python and comfortable working with frameworks like LlamaIndex, LangChain, or equivalent orchestration tools for building retrieval, extraction, and reasoning pipelines.
• You have experience with vision models and multimodal AI — extracting structured information from images and documents is core to this role.
• You understand how to design evaluation and feedback loops for AI systems: measuring accuracy, catching regressions, and improving over time.
• You can work with APIs, databases (Postgres), and existing internal systems. You do not need a clean abstraction layer handed to you.
• You use AI tools (Copilot, Claude, Cursor, etc.) as part of your daily workflow, not as a novelty.
• You have worked in fast-moving environments where you had to figure out both the problem and the solution yourself.
• You can talk to non-technical operations teams, understand their process and edge cases, and translate that into system requirements.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity and have a bias for action. The current process is manual and poorly documented. You will need to reverse-engineer it before you can automate it.
• You have a proven track record. You can point to AI-powered systems you have built that run in production and handle real workloads.