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San Francisco, United States

Head of Applied AI

Raydar · San Francisco · United States

Salary
$350,000–$500,000 per year
Contract
Full time

Posted: 11/7/2026 · Last checked: 11/10/2026

Job description

Quoted in full from Raydar's job posting. Gavroche does not edit it.

About the company

Our client is an artificial intelligence company.

The role

Raydar is recruiting for this role on behalf of our client. Lead the engineering organization for an applied AI product, setting technical direction, building and developing the team, and staying hands-on with production code. The role combines engineering leadership with individual building, customer-facing technical discussions, and input into which technical directions to pursue.

What you'll do

- Chart the engineering course and determine which components are common across the platform versus tailored to individual clients.

- Recruit strong engineers, grow the people already on the team, and expect sound engineering judgment.

- Contribute production code and personally solve hard engineering problems with the group.

- Represent engineering in important customer conversations and take ownership of hard technical issues.

- Weigh competing priorities such as dependability, polish, delivery pace and client requirements, ensuring design choices translate into a stronger product.

- Pick the most promising experiments to pursue, convert research findings into roadmap items, and judge when work is ready for release.

Requirements

What we're looking for

- 3 to 5 years of experience.

- Experience building and shipping AI agent systems at a startup or scale-up, with a pivotal role in the work.

- Hands-on familiarity with the difficulties of running AI systems in live settings, such as dependability, testing, external integrations, information handling and recovering from mistakes.

- Track record of guiding a product's structure as it expands, deciding which parts are shared and which are bespoke for particular clients.

- Background in developing an engineering team: bringing in strong people, coaching them and holding releases to a demanding standard.

- Opinionated views on AI system design, including memory, evaluation and permissioning in enterprise settings.

- A hands-on builder who still writes and ships production code.

- Ability to earn customer trust in difficult technical conversations and resolve the underlying problem.

Benefits

Compensation and benefits

- Base salary: USD 350,000 to 500,000 per year

- Competitive compensation

Location and work model

- San Francisco, CA, United States

- On-site

- Full-time

From Gavroche data

Figures computed from live adverts on Gavroche; the job text above is the employer's.

New openings in San Francisco, by week

  1. 8/17/2026 238
  2. 8/24/2026 272
  3. 8/31/2026 346
  4. 9/7/2026 302
  5. 9/14/2026 373
  6. 9/21/2026 438
  7. 9/28/2026 527
  8. 10/5/2026 495
  9. 10/12/2026 595
  10. 10/19/2026 454
  11. 10/26/2026 485
  12. 11/2/2026 479
  13. 11/9/2026 108

5,112 openings over 12 weeks, by the week they were published.

Other roles at Raydar

725 open, including roles outside the United States.