Head of AI / Principal AI Architect / ML Engineer / Data Scientist

Job Description

Role: Head of AI / Principal AI Architect / ML Engineer / Data Scientist San Francisco (Hybrid)

Position Type: Full-Time (Permanent or Contract)

Urgency: URGENT

Start Date: ASAP

Team Size: High-agency founding team working at the cutting edge of agentic and multi-modal AI

Compensation & Terms

Base Salary: $200,000 $350,000 (dependent on experience and level)

Equity: ~2% (flexible based on final role and comp level)

Visa Support: Not available

Sign-On Bonus: Not mentioned

Interview-to-Offer Turnaround: Varies based on scheduling

Role Summary

Join a YC-backed, high-growth fintech startup transforming the $1.25T private wealth industry with AI. As

Head of AI or Principal AI Architect, youll lead the development of foundational model architectures and

agentic systems used for financial planning, recommendation, and autonomous analysis. Work directly

with the CEO and CTO to bring to life generative copilots, retrieval-augmented advisors, and multi-modal

assistants built with LLMs, advanced prompting, and orchestration strategies.

Key Responsibilities

Architect and scale generative AI systems for financial reasoning and planning

Build RAG pipelines to retrieve financial knowledge from structured/unstructured sources

Design autonomous agents to power user-facing workflows and copilot experiences

Apply advanced prompting strategies (Tree of Thoughts, Constitutional AI, Agent protocol)

Collaborate cross-functionally with product, business, and engineering stakeholders

Candidate Must-Haves

Hands-on experience building or fine-tuning LLMs or foundation models

Experience at a top AI lab or foundation model org (e.g., OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, FAIR) PhD (or equivalent) in AI/ML from a top institution (e.g., Stanford, MIT, CMU, Berkeley)

Technical depth in:

LLMs (e.g., GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA 3)

RAG optimization & hybrid search

Multi-modal systems (text + voice)

Agent orchestration for financial planning or similar use cases

Startup-style work ethic (9am-9pm, 6 days/week)

Comfortable working with non-technical teams

Strongly Preferred

Publications in NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, CVPR

Fintech or financial modeling experience

Led AI/ML research teams or zero-to-one product builds

Familiarity with Python, TypeScript, Claude, LLaMA, DynamoDB, AWS

Work Model & Environment

Location: San Francisco (in-office 3 days/week)

Hybrid Schedule: Yes 3 days onsite

Culture: Intense, high-agency, deep technical collaboration

Client Impact: Consumer-facing product already in use with six-figure revenue

Full-time

Hybrid remote