AI & Automation Lead (f/m/x)

About lemon.markets 🍋 We grow investing opportunities for all European customers and businesses, providing seamless access to capital markets. We enable everyone to be an investor. lemon.markets builds infrastructure for financial services and technology companies powering the next generation of investment products. From enabling a FinTech to launch their first investment product, over allowing e.g. a Neobank to embed investing into their product to bringing investing into a completely new context. Our API-first infrastructure makes launching an investment product customer-centric and compliant. We abstract all complexity for our partners through a well documented API, a self-service customer operations portal and operating in a clear regulatory framework. Enabling partners to launch in weeks, not months. We have experienced first hand that brokerage infrastructure is broken. Building an investment product used to be highly expensive, challenging and cumbersome. We ease this pain by shielding our partners & their customers from the underlying complexity - and with that we make investing more accessible to everyone. Because that’s exactly what we enjoy, going to places nobody else dares and solving hard problems. This not only creates tons of value when done right, but attracts the smartest minds - because outlier companies are built by exceptional (& diverse) people like you. Your Mission: As AI & Automation Lead, you will establish and lead lemon.markets’ first dedicated AI function, making AI a safe, practical and measurable part of how the whole company works. Reporting directly to the VP Engineering and operating across the first line, you will identify high-value opportunities across Engineering, Finance, Operations, Compliance, Product, Sales, Partner Management and People and turn them into solutions that improve efficiency without compromising quality or control. You will build on the foundations already being established, including a governed AI platform, an inventory of current use cases and an initial risk assessment aligned with the EU AI Act. A key part of your role will be creating the standards, measurement framework and decision processes that determine which use cases are scaled, improved or stopped. Working closely with Engineering, Finance, Risk Management and Compliance, you will balance innovation with data protection, operational resilience, cost discipline and regulatory expectations. This is your opportunity to shape how a regulated financial company adopts AI responsibly, while building a function that leaves lasting capability across the organisation. In this role you will • Lead the AI function and work with department heads across lemon.markets to identify, prioritise and deliver use cases that create measurable business value beyond Engineering. • Build a transparent, evidence-based portfolio of AI initiatives with business owners, baselines, success metrics and appropriate guardrails, ensuring that promising ideas become sustainable improvements. • Enable teams across the company to use AI effectively themselves by developing practical workflows, guidance and capabilities that reduce manual effort without creating dependency on the AI function. • Set the standards for our governed AI platform with Engineering, including model selection, evaluation, access controls, data protection, human approval points and reliable fallback processes. • Partner with Risk Management, Compliance and Finance to ensure AI use cases meet regulatory expectations, remain within agreed risk and cost boundaries, and receive the appropriate independent review and sign-off. • Establish a measurement framework that connects efficiency gains to quality, risk and customer outcomes, enabling clear decisions about when to scale, improve or stop an initiative. • Lead and grow a team of AI Engineers and Data Scientists, setting priorities and using demonstrated demand and measurable impact to guide future investment. You’ll be successful in this role if • You have shipped applied AI or data solutions into production and managed use cases from discovery through implementation, measurement and improvement. • You have driven adoption beyond Engineering, helping teams such as Finance, Operations, Compliance, Sales or Product improve how they work. • You have experience in a regulated or highly controlled environment and understand the importance of governance, independent scrutiny and clear lines of responsibility. • You are rigorous about measurement, establishing baselines, defining quality guardrails and assessing the full impact of a solution before scaling it. • You understand the economics of AI, including inference costs, model routing, evaluation and the difference between an assistant and an autonomous workflow. • You are technically credible and hands-on enough to work effectively with engineers, with a working understanding of topics such as retrieval, access controls, evaluation and AI security risks. • You take ownership and communicate clearly, challenging assumptions, stopping initiatives when the evidence does not support them and building trust with senior stakeholders and control functions. • You are comfortable with ambiguity and change, and enjoy building a new function while balancing practical delivery with long-term standards. • You are fluent in English. Knowledge of German is a major advantage given our regulatory environment and our parent company. How we take care of you: • 🚀 Compensation package: We offer you a competitive salary, based on your experience and the value-add you bring to lemon.markets. • 🕑 Flexible working hours: We trust people to choose when they work best and avoid a rigid 9 to 5 mindset. You decide on the rhythm that helps you do your best work, with only shared core hours from 12:00 to 16:00 to support collaboration. • 🏢 Hybrid work setup: You can work from anywhere in Germany within a hybrid model. At the same time, in-person collaboration is a key part of our culture. That being said, leadership lemoneers work 7 days or more per month on-site in our Berlin office, spending quality time together with the team at events, onsites/offsites or over team dinners. • 📈 Grow with us: We take your personal development seriously! You’ll get regular mentorship and stretch opportunities, a clear career development framework with frequent feedback conversations as well as an annual learning budget. • 🌱 People & culture: You’ll feel our culture in the small things, like Polaroids from our lemoneers’ first day and our monthly new-joiner breakfasts. But also in the bigger things, like celebrating the onboarding of new partners or our annual offsites, where the whole company comes together to connect, reflect, and celebrate. • 💛 Perks & benefits: We choose benefits that add actual value. We sponsor a Deutschlandticket for employees on unlimited contracts, plus 50% off on Beatvest - our partner for financial education and investing. • 🏝 Workation: Get out of here! At lemon.markets you can work remotely from anywhere in the EU for up to 10 consecutive days at a time, and up to 60 days per year in total. As an equal opportunity employer, lemon.markets is committed to building an inclusive workplace. The company welcomes people from all different backgrounds, including age, citizenship, ethnic and racial origins, gender identities, individuals with disabilities, marital status, religions and ideologies, and sexual orientations to apply. If you feel this role could be a great match for you even if you don’t tick every box, we’d still love to hear from you, please apply. You have any questions? Feel free to contact us via Find Jobs in Germany on Arbeitnow