Head of AI / AI Engineering Leader
Salary: $300K–$450K + Equity
Location: San Francisco
Sector: Tech
Our client is a high-growth, venture-backed AI company building advanced AI agents for the insurance industry — a trillion-dollar global market still heavily dependent on manual, complex workflows.
Combining frontier agentic AI with deep industry expertise, the company is transforming how some of the insurance sector’s most critical work gets done.
Following significant institutional funding and rapid growth, the business is already working with major insurance carriers, brokers and large enterprise customers.
The company is deeply technical and engineering-led, with AI at the core of both its product and long-term strategy.
They are now looking for an exceptional AI Engineering Leader to own and scale the AI organisation — covering the agents, infrastructure and products at the heart of the platform.
The Opportunity
This is a rare opportunity to take ownership of the AI function within a rapidly scaling, early-stage technology company.
You’ll lead the existing AI team and build the organisation across three core areas:
AI Infrastructure — model routing, reliability and production infrastructure
Agent Intelligence — evaluations, shared tooling and multimodal pipelines
Agentic Products — customer-facing AI assistants and long-running autonomous workflows
You’ll set the technical direction for production-grade AI agents operating within complex, high-value enterprise environments.
This is not a purely managerial role. You’ll remain deeply technical, working across architecture, experimentation and engineering while building the team around you.
What You’ll Do
Own and scale the AI engineering organisation
Define the technical strategy for production-grade agentic AI systems
Build infrastructure supporting reliable, long-running AI agents
Recruit, mentor and retain exceptional AI engineers and future engineering leaders
Establish rigorous approaches to evaluation, reliability and model performance
Work closely with founders, engineering and product leadership
Remain hands-on with architecture and code
Push the capabilities of AI agents within complex insurance workflows
Example Technical Challenges
Building intelligent model-routing systems optimised across speed, accuracy and cost
Infrastructure for reliable, long-running autonomous agents
AI assistants capable of understanding complex documents, interacting with connected enterprise systems and taking actions end-to-end
Evaluation and reliability frameworks for production agentic systems
Multimodal AI pipelines and shared agent tooling
What We’re Looking For
You’ll likely have:
Proven experience leading AI/ML engineering teams building production LLM or agentic systems
Direct experience shipping AI products rather than operating solely in research or advisory roles
Deep understanding of agent architectures including tool use, planning, orchestration, evaluations and reliability
Strong hands-on technical capability and the ability to operate comfortably at code and architecture level
Experience recruiting and scaling high-performing engineering teams
The ability to develop future technical leaders beneath you
Strong written and verbal communication skills
Experience within high-growth B2B SaaS or venture-backed technology companies would be highly advantageous.
Insurance experience is not essential.
Above all, we’re looking for someone with exceptional drive, technical ambition and ownership — someone excited by the opportunity to build a major AI organisation rather than simply inherit one.
Why Join?
This is an opportunity to:
Own the AI function at a rapidly scaling AI company
Build an engineering organisation from an early stage
Work on genuinely complex production agentic AI systems
Solve problems within one of the world’s largest industries
Work alongside an exceptional technical founding and engineering team
Have significant influence over product and technical direction
Participate meaningfully in the company’s future through equity
Candidates must already be legally authorized to work in the United States. Visa sponsorship or relocation-based immigration sponsorship is not available for this position.
Please note: Due to the high volume of applications, we will only contact shortlisted candidates. If you have not heard from us within two weeks, please consider your application unsuccessful at this time.
Please email your CV to info@alfa-executive.com quoting ref PJ/ALFA/SCM