Head of Applied AI

Artisan • Full-time • New York, NY, US • $220,000 - $350,000 / year • 9h ago

About Us

At Artisan, we’re building real AI employees - not copilots, not assistants, but autonomous teammates.

Our first, Ava, is an AI BDR. She finds and researches leads, writes emails in customers’ tone of voice, runs outbound sequences, self-optimizes, and manages email deliverability infrastructure. She learns, adapts, and improves over time - just like a human would.

Human team members use Artisan as their primary working platform, replacing a sprawling stack of sales tools, and have Artisans working alongside them.

We went through Y Combinator (W24) and have raised $35M+ from top investors. We’re at $6M+ ARR, with hundreds of customers including Remote, Quora, and SumUp.

We’re currently working on Ava 2.0, pushing the boundaries of what an AI employee can do. And we're hiring.

About The Role

This is a unique opportunity to ship cutting edge AI products which will interact with tens of millions of people and push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI. You’ll lead Applied AI across product and infra, starting with Ava. That means:

Architecting the prompt frameworks that make up different components of Ava - email generation, chat interaction, etc
Optimize prompt chains, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and tool use (e.g., calendar APIs, CRM systems)
Driving infrastructure choices for prompt routing, model mix, eval loops, and long-term memory
Partnering with product to define safety rails, user controls, and metrics to build trust in fully autonomous agents
Hiring and mentoring an elite Applied AI team as we scale beyond our AI BDR into other roles
Working with AI engineers to design multi-step agent workflows that decide strategy, adapt in real time, and stay within user-defined guardrails

What You Bring

2+ years building real AI products in production - be that internally or as part of a foundation model Applied AI team
Deep hands-on experience with agents, function calling, RAG pipelines, or self-healing workflows (LangChain, Dust, ReAct, OpenAI Tools, etc)
Comfort wearing both hats: thinking like a researcher, and shipping like an engineer
Experience owning LLM latency, reliability, and cost in production
Strong communication and team leadership skills

Why Join Us

A unique opportunity to lead the development of AI employees which will interact with 10s of millions of people
Report directly to and work closely with our CEO
Extremely competitive compensation and full benefits
Flexibility and autonomy to build your team as you see fit
Collaborate with a mission-driven, ambitious, and extremely talented team
Fast-moving culture where you'll ship meaningful work every week