Head of Applied AI at Artisan (W24)
$220K - $350K  •  0.20% - 0.50%
AI employees called Artisans, starting with an AI BDR
San Francisco, CA, US / New York, NY, US
Full-time
Will sponsor
3+ years
About Artisan

At Artisan, we're on a mission to create the most advanced human-like digital workers, called Artisans, and the software operating system for startups across verticals. We're starting with sales through our Artisan Sales platform and Ava, The Sales Rep Artisan.

Our first Artisan, Ava, is a BDR who automates the entire outbound sales process and can be set up with a 10-minute conversation. Ava creates the user's ICP, prospects with her database of over 270M contacts, does lead research, crafts & sends highly bespoke email sequences, and books meetings into sales reps' calendars.

We recently launched Artisan Labs, our research lab where we're pioneering the foundational technologies required to create human-like digital workers.

This is the next Industrial Revolution.

About the role

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

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