Director of Engineering, AI Agents | High-Growth AI Startup
📍 San Francisco, CA
💰 Base salary up 300K 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