Applied AI Specialist

Location: Amsterdam (hybrid)

Employment type: full-time (40 h/week)

Seniority level: Senior Consultant (corresponding to a minimum of 5 years of work experience)

Visa sponsorship: possible only for candidates <30 years of age

A little bit about us

Riverflex was founded in Amsterdam and London in 2018 and has grown into a global team of consultants united by one mission: to help courageous leaders drive intelligent transformation. We integrate three service pillars - strategy & transformation consulting that Creates Change, talent services that Build Teams, and business-accelerating AI products that Augment Intelligence.

We are not a traditional consultancy. We work at C-level with blue-chip companies on the programmes that actually matter, and we are building our Technology Risk practice at exactly the moment the market needs it most.

Your role as Applied AI Specialist

You'll be an AI Business Specialist in our consulting practice, working hands-on inside the Applied AI consulting team. The person who walks into a client's finance, ops, CX or sales function, understands how the work actually gets done today, and helps redesign it around AI primitives - skills, memory, plugins, connectors, harnesses, agents.

You sit at the intersection of business, product, and technology, but you lead with the build. You're a builder first – typically from an engineering, science or technical product background – who has moved, or is moving, into client-facing, product-minded work. Think of it as roughly 60% forward-deployed engineer, 40% strategist. You prototype your own solutions using AI-assisted coding tools and no-code platforms - wiring up connectors, drafting specifications, and testing what works before handing it to engineering to harden. The job is translating between what a customer actually needs and what the AI system has to look like to deliver it. This is partly an AI engineering role, but not one about running high-traffic, mission-critical systems at scale. For this reason, an engineering background is highly preferred but not a must. It is also not a strategy slide-deck role. And it is not a team-management role. Your job is to bring deep specialist craft and ship things, not to run people.

What you’ll do

Four core mandates, roughly equal weight in year one.

• Implement AI for clients. Lead Applied AI workstreams on flagship engagements with major European retailers and financial services clients. You'll run discovery, help design the AI Operating System for the function in scope, and ship the first wave of skills, agents and integrations alongside the client team, often turning what you heard in discovery into a working prototype or proposal within a day or two. Outcomes - measurable productivity uplift, redesigned workflows - not slide decks that die in PowerPoint.

• Implement AI internally at Riverflex. We eat our own cooking. Our internal AI capability platform, our delivery process, the way we run the firm - you'll help redesign our ways of working around AI and ship the building blocks. This is also where most of our reusable IP gets created, and where you'll build your own muscle on the tools before deploying them at clients.

• Lift the craft of our Applied AI consulting team through your specialist expertise. You're the specialist plugged into client engagements, internal labs and capability sessions. You bring patterns, skills and shipped examples; you coach colleagues through real work; you contribute what you build into our reusable library. The team's craft level rises because you're in it – and you'll sharpen your own consulting craft working alongside our senior consultants.

• Help build our AI coaching and change propositions. We have new propositions launching across AI coaching, team-building in the era of AI, and AI-native operating models. You'll be hands-on in the productisation: building materials, running early engagements, and feeding learnings back into the offer. The thesis is that 90% of AI value sits in workflow integration - you're part of how we prove it on the ground.

Who you are

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in engineering, data/science, technical product or another builder role, of which at least 2 in AI. An AI engineering background is a plus, not a must. We're equally open to candidates from a strategy or product background who have become substantially more hands-on in building over recent years.

• Client-facing experience embedded in a business context – consulting, solutions, forward-deployed or customer-facing product work. Formal consulting experience isn't required, but exposure to structured settings beyond early-stage startups is.

• Demonstrated ability to walk into a function, model how work gets done today, and redesign it.

• Hands-on experience developing and deploying applications with Claude Code, Copilot, OpenAI, Gemini, or other AI-powered IDEs. You have a solid understanding of "HOW" things are built and distributed to real users. Side and personal projects count – we want to see things you've actually built.

• Technical enough to prototype independently with an experimental mindset: you understand how APIs, webhooks, data models and deployment work in practice, and the consequences of the design patterns you choose. You're confident building skills, plugins or connectors with AI-assisted coding and no-code tools, and comfortable iterating when something breaks. Deep computer-science knowledge (algorithms, data structures) is not required.

• Working understanding of LLM primitives - context windows, memory, tools, agents, evaluation - and of where the bottleneck currently is in real deployments. We'll help you build the consulting and strategy craft – that's our core muscle.

• Knowing when AI is the right tool for the job, and when it isn't, including when to lean on a coding agent versus building something yourself.

• Strong client presence and communication skills - confident running discovery sessions and demos with director-level stakeholders. A good listener who gets to the real question, structures the problem and explains your thinking clearly.

• A curious, always-learning mindset: you follow AI and tech trends/tooling closely out of genuine interest, not just professional necessity.

• Fluent in English, Netherlands-based.

What earns extra points

• Have a public GitHub showing real work, and/or an active social presence around AI (posts, projects, building in public)

• Experience designing change around AI specifically (not generic "digital transformation")

• Existing footprint in the Anthropic, Claude, Copilot, OpenAI or Databricks ecosystems

• Domain experience in retail, financial services or consumer

• Dutch is a bonus, not a requirement

What we offer

• A competitive compensation package.

• 25 days off per year, plus a full week off between Christmas and New Year.

• Flexible work from abroad for up to 6 weeks per year.

• Pension scheme to help you plan for your future.

• Learning & Development budget, including full access to all Coursera courses.

• ClassPass membership.

• Access to the latest tools: ChatGPT Pro, Claude, Notion, SlideHub and Riverflex's in-house developed software.

• Equity share scheme for long-term team members.

• A clear path to Director with profit-share upside.

Why join now?

Riverflex is growing its Applied AI practice at the exact moment enterprise demand is moving from pilot to production. The clients are real, the mandates are live, and the practice is being built now - not inherited. You'll step in with direct exposure to working with our friends at Anthropic and Databricks, founder-level coaching, and the autonomy to shape how AI actually lands inside major European organisations. If you want the leverage of an early-stage practice with the reach of clients you've heard of, you're in the right conversation.