AI Lead

<h5>Be a part of the next big thing</h5><p>Do you thrive on tackling complex challenges? Are you passionate about creating impactful solutions that drive commerce forward? Do you believe in encouraging and elevating those around you?<br></p><h5>About us</h5><p>Kustom, formerly known as Klarna Checkout (KCO), is the Nordic market leader in digital checkout solutions. Today, we support over 24,000 merchants across more than 170 countries, providing a streamlined checkout experience. We offer localized solutions in 18 markets, tailored to specific languages, currencies, and payment methods. No matter where businesses operate, we deliver a checkout experience that meets the needs of both merchants and shoppers – driving growth globally. 🌍<br></p><h5>The role</h5><p>As AI Lead, you own Kustom's AI product and architecture strategy. You decide where AI creates real business value, build the platform and infrastructure behind it, and enable every engineering team to use AI safely and efficiently.</p><p>This is hands-on technical leadership that reaches across Product, Engineering, Data, Security, and Leadership. You will write production code, build prototypes, evaluate models, and shape our long-term architecture.</p><p>Our teams are based in Stockholm, where we prioritize in-person collaboration at our office to foster strong team dynamics.</p><h5>What you'll own</h5><ul><li><p><strong>AI architecture:</strong> Design and build Kustom’s AI platform, including model routing, agentic commerce, agentic protocols, and CLI strategy</p></li><li><p><strong>Build vs partner:</strong> Evaluate when to use AI partners versus building internal capabilities</p></li><li><p><strong>Data foundation:</strong> Make Kustom’s data AI-ready across quality, indexing, structured and unstructured data, embeddings, semantic search, and context management</p></li><li><p><strong>Product enablement:</strong> Help Product Managers and Engineers identify and ship high-value AI opportunities across merchant experience and developer experience</p></li><li><p><strong>Future technology:</strong> Continuously evaluate foundation models, open-source models, agentic systems, multimodal AI, AI infrastructure, knowledge graphs, MCP, and CLI ecosystems</p></li><li><p><strong>Technical standards:</strong> Establish reusable capabilities, patterns, and architecture standards that product teams can consume</p></li></ul><h5>Skills & experience you'll need</h5><ul><li><p>Strong curiosity and engagement in the frontier movement within AI</p></li><li><p>7+ years in Software / AI Engineering</p></li><li><p>Strong backend engineering experience</p></li><li><p>Some experience with data engineering platforms</p></li><li><p>Some experience with cloud platforms</p></li><li><p>Some experience building scalable distributed systems</p></li></ul><p><em>And several of: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Vector databases, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, RAG, CLIs, MCP, Agents, context engineering, Knowledge Graphs, GraphRAG, Event-driven architectures</em></p><h5>We think you'll love this role if you</h5><ul><li><p>Build things before they become popular</p></li><li><p>Spend weekends trying the newest AI models</p></li><li><p>Read research papers for fun</p></li><li><p>Care deeply about software architecture</p></li><li><p>Enjoy solving impossible technical problems</p></li><li><p>Prefer building platforms over one-off features</p></li><li><p>Like shipping fast while maintaining engineering quality</p></li></ul><h5>Success looks like</h5><p>Within your first 12 months, you've:</p><ul><li><p>Driven further adoption and future-proof validation of Kustom AI product offering</p></li><li><p>Enabled multiple engineering teams to ship AI-powered products</p></li><li><p>Reduced merchant integration effort through AI tooling (CLIs, etc)</p></li><li><p>Identified and delivered measurable business impact from AI</p></li><li><p>Positioned Kustom as an AI-native commerce platform</p></li></ul><h5>Benefits </h5><ul><li><p><strong>Secure your future</strong> with a competitive pension package, including both national and occupational pension contributions.</p></li><li><p><strong>Comprehensive health coverage</strong> with extensive health insurance, long-term illness protection, and flexible salary exchange options.</p></li><li><p><strong>Invest in your wellbeing</strong> with an annual wellness allowance of <strong>3,000 SEK</strong> to spend on the activities that keep you healthy and energized.</p></li><li><p><strong>More time to enjoy life</strong> with an extra day off when major holidays, such as Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, fall on a weekend.</p></li></ul><h5>A place to grow</h5><p>At Kustom, you won’t just be another face in the crowd. This is a place where we elevate each other and celebrate success as a team. We believe in our ability to create excelle