Head of Applied AI

*Hiring on behalf of our client

Title: Head of Applied AI

Time: Full-time.

Location: San Francisco, CA (In-person)

Compensation: $350,000 - $500,000 / year + competitive equity

The Company

Our client is an applied research lab building a self-improving, model-agnostic agent harness that automates enterprise knowledge work. Backed by $24M in funding from top-tier venture firms and prominent angel investors, they are rapidly scaling and on track to reach $55M ARR with over 50 enterprise customers. The founding and engineering team brings elite pedigree from top institutions and proven track records in high-growth technology environments.

Role Overview

Our client is seeking an exceptional Head of Applied AI to drive the technical and research direction of their agent platform. In this high-impact role, you will set architectural standards, lead and scale the engineering team, and actively write production code alongside engineers. You will solve the foundational challenges of production-grade AI agents, translate state-of-the-art research into customer-ready capabilities, and act as the technical face of engineering in critical customer discussions.

Key Responsibilities:

• Set a cohesive technical direction, ensuring the product architecture is durable, understandable, and scalable.
• Decide what belongs in the core shared product platform versus customer-specific implementations.
• Lead and scale the engineering team through hands-on hiring, mentoring, and maintaining a high standard for technical judgment.
• Build directly alongside the team by writing production code and solving complex technical issues firsthand.
• Act as the primary technical voice for enterprise customers, joining key discussions and translating customer needs into architectural solutions.
• Navigate trade-offs across reliability, product quality, development velocity, and customer requirements.
• Define the product and research roadmap, determining which technical bets drive meaningful customer value and turning research breakthroughs into shipped product features.

Qualifications

• 3 to 5 years of relevant engineering and technical leadership experience.
• Proven track record building and shipping AI agents within a high-growth startup or scale-up environment.
• Deep, hands-on experience solving production agent challenges, including reliability, evaluation frameworks, tool use, context handling, and error recovery.
• Demonstrated success shaping and evolving software architecture as a company and platform scale.
• Active involvement in writing and shipping production-level code.
• Strong leadership and communication skills, with the ability to build trust directly with enterprise customers during high-stakes technical conversations.
• Legal authorization to work in the United States (visa sponsorship available for H-1B, O-1, and OPT).