Director of AI

Director of AI

Compensation: $240,000 base + Bonus

Location: Fully Remote, United States

Join an established, PE-backed software company making AI a central part of its product and engineering strategy across a large-scale SaaS platform serving tens of thousands of customers.

The business already has production AI workloads in market and is now expanding its AI capabilities across agentic systems, compliance intelligence, knowledge graphs, retrieval, memory, content generation, and embedded AI experiences throughout its product portfolio.

The Mission

The company is building the next generation of AI capabilities across an established software platform operating in a regulated environment.

The objective is not simply to add isolated AI features. The company wants to create a durable AI architecture and operating model that can support multiple product teams, customer-facing workflows, and shared infrastructure at scale.

The Role

You will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for shaping the architecture behind customer-facing AI across the organization.

This is a true player-coach position. You will remain hands-on in the code while also setting technical direction, building reference implementations, mentoring engineers, and helping multiple product teams adopt scalable AI patterns.

What You’ll Do

• Own architecture for customer-facing AI across agentic workflows, retrieval, memory, context, evaluations, knowledge graphs, ontologies, and embedded AI capabilities.
• Design reusable patterns for agent harnesses, MCP server and client architecture, prompt and context standards, evaluation methodology, and AI infrastructure.
• Build prototypes, reference implementations, and production-ready patterns that broader product engineering teams can adopt.
• Remain hands-on through regular coding, architecture reviews, technical design, and problem solving.
• Help product teams take AI systems from early implementation through production and ongoing operation.
• Define standards for evaluating non-deterministic AI systems, including offline and online evaluation, regression testing, golden datasets, and production quality controls.

What You’ll Bring

• Ample software engineering experience, with significant technical ownership of production software systems.
• Hands-on experience architecting and shipping customer-facing AI products used by real customers in production.
• Strong experience with agentic systems, tool calling, orchestration, agent runtimes, retrieval, memory, and context management.
• Experience designing or operating large-scale RAG and retrieval systems.
• Strong understanding of AI evaluation, including approaches such as golden datasets, regression testing, hallucination testing, human-reviewed baselines, precision and recall, or LLM-as-judge techniques.

Why Join?

• Own the technical direction for AI across an established software platform with meaningful production scale.
• Work on sophisticated problems spanning agents, MCP, retrieval, memory, evaluation, knowledge graphs, governance, and multi-model infrastructure.
• Join at a stage where production AI already exists, but the broader architecture and engineering standards are still being shaped.
• Maintain substantial hands-on technical involvement while operating with director-level influence.
• Work directly with senior engineering leadership and have meaningful input into major architecture and platform decisions.

About People In AI

We partner with AI-first startups, scale-ups, financial technology companies, and enterprise organizations to connect exceptional technical and product talent with opportunities to build production AI systems, intelligent products, and the next generation of AI-enabled businesses.