Director of Engineering – AI Agents

Location: San Francisco, CA (on - site)Employment Type: Full-timeWork Arrangement: On-site, five days per weekBase Salary: $300,000–$450,000 + equity

About the Company

Our client is a venture-backed AI startup building intelligent automation for the insurance industry. Its technology helps insurance organizations streamline complex, document-heavy workflows, improve operational efficiency, and make better decisions.

About the Role

We are seeking a Director of Engineering – AI Agents to lead and scale the company's AI engineering organization. You will own the technical direction of production LLM-powered agents that automate business-critical insurance workflows.

Working closely with technical founders, you will influence product strategy, build engineering teams, and remain actively involved in architecture and code. This role combines organizational leadership with hands-on responsibility for delivering reliable AI systems in production.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and scale the AI engineering organization across three areas: AI infrastructure, agent intelligence, and customer-facing agentic products.
• Define the technical strategy for model routing, multi-agent orchestration, reliability, and production performance.
• Lead development of evaluation frameworks, shared tools, and multimodal pipelines that improve agent capabilities.
• Oversee delivery of AI assistants and long-running workflows used by customers in business-critical operations.
• Recruit, mentor, and retain AI engineers, including engineering leaders as the organization grows.
• Stay closely involved in code, architecture, and technical decisions, setting high engineering standards through hands-on leadership.
• Partner with the founders to shape product direction and translate customer needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Evaluate advances in AI agents and apply them to practical insurance use cases.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, including experience managing engineering teams at a venture-backed startup.
• Experience building and operating production LLM applications or AI agents.
• Strong technical judgment across system architecture, model routing, multi-agent orchestration, and reliability.
• Experience with evaluation frameworks, shared agent tooling, and multimodal workflows.
• Strong Python engineering skills and the ability to contribute directly to code and architecture.
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, develop, and lead engineering talent.
• Ability to connect technical strategy with customer needs and product priorities.
• Willingness to work on-site in San Francisco five days per week.

Technology Environment

LLMs, agentic AI, Python, multi-agent orchestration, model routing, evaluation frameworks, and multimodal pipelines.