Head of Applied AI

HEAD OF APPLIED AI

Location: San Francisco, CA, USA
Employment Type: Full-Time
Work Arrangement: In-Person
Experience: 3–5 Years
Base Salary: $350,000–$500,000 per year
Equity: Competitive
Visa Sponsorship: H-1B, O-1, OPT

ABOUT THE COMPANY

An applied research lab building a self-improving, model-agnostic AI agent platform designed to automate enterprise knowledge work.

The company has raised $24 million from leading investors, including Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, and is targeting $55 million in annual recurring revenue with more than 50 customers.

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Head of Applied AI will lead technical strategy, engineering execution, and product development for an advanced AI agent platform. This is a hands-on leadership position combining architecture, production engineering, team development, customer engagement, and applied AI research.

The successful candidate will shape the technical direction, build and scale the engineering team, and translate promising AI research into reliable products that solve enterprise problems.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Define and own the technical direction and long-term architecture of the AI platform.

• Determine which capabilities belong in the shared product versus customer-specific implementations.

• Lead engineering hiring, team development, technical standards, and delivery.

• Write production code and solve complex technical challenges alongside the engineering team.

• Lead technical discussions with customers, understand their requirements, and resolve complex engineering issues.

• Balance reliability, product quality, development speed, and customer needs.

• Set product and research priorities, translating promising technical developments into customer-facing capabilities.

• Ensure architectural decisions translate into measurable improvements in product performance and quality.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Proven experience building and shipping AI agents at a startup or scale-up.

• Hands-on experience solving production AI agent challenges, including reliability, evaluation, tool use, context management, and error handling.

• Experience shaping product architecture as a platform scales.

• Engineering leadership experience, including hiring, technical direction, mentoring, and delivery.

• Strong production coding ability and willingness to remain hands-on.

• Ability to lead complex technical customer conversations and take ownership of engineering outcomes.

IDEAL CANDIDATE PROFILE

• Early or founding engineer at a high-performing AI-native company, with direct contributions to core agent systems.

• Alternatively, an engineer from a high-bar AI team with meaningful ownership of shipped AI products.

• Demonstrated expertise in agent harness architecture, including short- and long-term memory, evaluations, benchmarks, and enterprise permissioning.

• Evidence of personal technical contributions, architectural decisions, and measurable product impact.

• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment.

NOT IDEAL IF

• Experience limited to large-company environments without evidence of adaptability to early-stage execution.

• No meaningful experience building and deploying AI agents.

HIRING PROCESS

Candidates should submit a GitHub profile or personal website demonstrating their technical work and contributions.

COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

• Base salary: $350,000–$500,000 per year.

• Competitive equity.

• Visa sponsorship available for H-1B, O-1, and OPT candidates.

• Full-time, in-person position in San Francisco, California.