Director of Engineering

Director of Engineering, AI Agents | High-Growth AI Startup

📍 San Francisco, CA

💰 Base salary up to $450K + meaningful equity

🏢 Full-time, 5 days onsite

🚀 Path toward VP-level leadership

✈️ Visa sponsorship and relocation support available

A fast-growing, venture-backed AI startup in San Francisco is looking for a Director of Engineering, AI Agents to own and scale its AI organization. The company is building production AI agents that automate complex workflows for enterprise customers.

This is a highly technical leadership position for someone who has successfully built production LLM/agent systems, scaled engineering teams, and still enjoys being deeply involved in code and architecture.

What You’ll Do

• Own and scale the AI engineering organization
• Set technical direction for production LLM and agent systems
• Build agentic systems involving tool use, planning, orchestration, evaluations, and reliability
• Recruit, mentor, and develop a world-class AI engineering team
• Hire and develop future engineering leaders
• Remain hands-on with architecture, code reviews, and experiment design
• Partner closely with founders on technical and product strategy
• Help build multiple specialized AI engineering teams as the company scales

Must-Haves

• 7+ years of AI/ML engineering experience
• Led an AI/ML team that shipped production LLM or AI agent systems
• Built and scaled an engineering team of 10+
• Deep hands-on experience with agentic AI architectures
• Strong knowledge of tool use, planning, multi-agent orchestration, and evaluation frameworks
• Still actively writes or reviews code
• Ability to evaluate technical architecture and experiment design
• Strong people leadership, mentoring, recruiting, and team-building skills
• CS or related technical degree from a top-tier university
• Clear and concise communicator
• High-ownership, founder-style mindset
• Must be based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco
• Comfortable working onsite 5 days per week

Nice-to-Haves

• Early-stage or high-growth B2B SaaS startup experience
• Experience with model routing
• Production LLM reliability and infrastructure
• Multimodal AI pipelines
• Advanced evaluation frameworks
• Founder or early-stage leadership experience

Not the Right Fit If

• You are primarily a people manager and are no longer technically hands-on
• Your background is primarily research or advisory work without shipped products
• You haven't led production AI-agent development
• You are looking for remote or hybrid work
• Your experience is primarily traditional large-tech environments without high-growth startup exposure

Why Join

This is an opportunity to own the entire AI organization at a rapidly scaling startup and shape both technical architecture and product direction.

You'll work directly with technical founders, build the AI organization from the ground up, and have a potential path toward VP-level engineering leadership