Job
- Level
- Senior
- Job Field
- Software, Data
- Employment Type
- Full Time
- Contract Type
- Permanent employment
- Location
- Berlin
- Working Model
- Hybrid, Onsite
Job Summary
In this role, you will define the technical strategy for AI-powered content systems, lead architectural decisions, and mentor engineers to ensure quality and scalability of the systems.
Job Technologies
Your role in the team
- Babbel Labs is looking for a Senior Principal Engineer to define and drive the long-term technical strategy for AI-powered content systems across the organisation.
- This is a Senior Principal-level Individual Contributor role with organisation-wide scope.
- You will own the technical direction for AI-powered content systems and lead the work across multiple teams, products, and domains.
- You will combine strategic leadership with hands-on technical impact through architecture ownership, design reviews, coaching, prototyping, and direct involvement in the most complex challenges.
- Working across AI, content, product, and platform engineering, you will define the technical vision, establish shared standards, align teams around key decisions, and ensure that AI-enabled systems are scalable, reliable, secure, and measurable in their impact on both the business and learner outcomes.
- Define and drive the long-term technical strategy for AI-powered content systems, ensuring alignment with Babbel Labs' business objectives and product vision.
- Shape architectural direction across multiple teams and domains, making key decisions on platforms, tooling, AI infrastructure, and build-versus-buy approaches that will influence how AI capabilities are developed and scaled.
- Lead the design of robust frameworks for AI evaluation, quality measurement, governance, observability, security, and operational reliability, enabling the responsible adoption of AI across the organisation.
- Partner closely with senior leaders across Engineering, Product, Content, and Data to translate strategic priorities into executable technical roadmaps and investment decisions.
- Identify organisation-wide technical risks, dependencies, and opportunities early, helping teams navigate ambiguity and make effective long-term decisions.
- Establish engineering standards, architectural principles, and operating practices that enable multiple teams to move faster while maintaining quality, security, and reliability.
- Mentor and support Principal and Senior Engineers, raising the overall technical capability of the organisation through coaching, design reviews, and technical leadership.
- Lead and contribute to the most complex technical initiatives, remaining close enough to the technology to guide critical architectural decisions and unblock challenging technical problems when needed.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership to delivery teams by translating strategic requirements into clear technical direction, supporting work decomposition, guiding implementation, and unblocking complex delivery challenges.
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Our expectations of you
Qualifications
- Strong foundation in computational linguistics, natural language processing, or applied linguistics, with the ability to contribute meaningfully to linguistic discussions and understand the role of linguistics in content creation pipelines.
- Proven success operating at Senior Principal Engineer level, or equivalent scope, within a technology organisation.
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy across multiple teams, products, or business domains.
- Strong understanding of AI evaluation, governance, observability, security, privacy, and operational risk management.
- Track record of leading organisation-wide technical initiatives from strategy through execution.
- Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence across functions and levels of the organisation.
- Ability to balance long-term technical vision with pragmatic execution in fast-moving and ambiguous environments.
Experience
- Deep experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems and platform architectures.
- Hands-on experience designing, building, and shipping AI/ML systems into production at scale - not just strategy or oversight, but direct technical contribution to model development, infrastructure, and productionisation under real product constraints.
- Experience partnering with senior leadership to shape technical roadmaps, investment decisions, and long-term technology strategy.
- Proven experience in technically leading groups of engineers through execution, including requirements decomposition, technical prioritization, implementation guidance, progress oversight, and direct coaching, while remaining an active Individual Contributor.
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What we offer
- This role operates at organisation-wide scope.
- Success is measured not only by what you build directly, but by the impact you have on the technical direction, execution capability, and long-term effectiveness of multiple teams.
- You will work closely with senior engineering leaders, product leadership, content experts, and executive stakeholders to shape how Babbel Labs leverages AI to transform content creation and deliver meaningful business and learner outcomes.
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Benefits
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This is your employer
Babbel
Founded in 2007, Babbel is the most used and most effective language learning app in the world. No small achievement, and no small challenge. At a time when walls are being talked about, we build bridges - making the language learning journey as exciting and empowering as possible, helping people to make new connections and participate in worlds bigger than their own.
Description
- Company Type
- Established Company
- Working Model
- Full Remote, Hybrid, Onsite
- Industry
- Education System
Senior Principal Engineer - AI Content Systems
- Location
- Berlin
- Working Model
- Hybrid, Onsite
- Diversity
- Open for all genders
- English Only
- English only required
