Demand.io is a technology company based in Santa Monica, CA focused on building digital consumer shopping platforms and experiences that help consumers find and acquire the things they'll love.
Founded in 2009, we're a self-funded, profitable company running multiple e-commerce consumer products at scale. Our success comes from our ability to innovate early, retain top talent through profit-sharing, and operate efficiently and decisively with an agile, lean startup ethos emphasizing profitability and sustainable, organic product growth.
As the e-commerce industry shifts from screen-based paradigms to newer AI-enabled conversation-driven ones, we're committed to delivering the industry's best AI shopping assistant through Product.ai. Leveraging open source foundation language models connected to our industry-leading e-commerce knowledge graph through emerging retriever-enhanced approaches, Product.ai aims to minimize hallucinations even for the most detailed e-commerce queries to provide actionable, trustworthy shopping recommendations. We're currently in mid-development, having procured our own A100 GPU server last fall we've ramped up our ability to train, fine-tune, and evaluate our models at scale.
Who we're looking for
We're seeking no less than a unicorn engineering leader to lead our talented engineering team, rallying, guiding, and mentoring them towards delivery of Product.ai. You'll bring substantial AI engineering experience, a hands-on style to leadership, and clear track record of 0-1 product innovation delivery and success. We don't want a professional manager, we want an engineer / architect who manages because it is incumbent upon them to do so. We're a flat team of super-ICs, operating with minimal structure and hierarchy, emphasizing empowerment, decentralized decision making, and bias towards action from junior staff on up.
For the right leader, we offer a unique and compelling place to call home. As a smaller, self-funded and profitable company, while we don't throw 8-figure budgets at every problem, we do have the runway and margin to invest aggressively towards solving hard problems. Our core e-commerce business funds our development, enabling adequate customer focus and time to iterate, ensuring we're not forced to take shortcuts and we're delivering uncompromising product experiences that deliver real, long-term value to our customers.
What you'll do

• Build and lead a high-performance global engineering team. Build a culture of innovation, collaboration, accountability, and excellence.
• Drive the end-to-end product development lifecycle, ensuring timely delivery of high quality, performant software.
• Drive the development and training of proprietary language models, AI pipelines, and related technologies.
• Drive the development and technology roadmap and our core AI commerce data platform, aligning to business objectives and content quality requirements, and serving the demanding needs of our network of user-facing products.
• Lead initiatives to build and maintain an advanced LLMOps pipeline, ensuring the seamless and efficient operation of our AI models, and keeping our technologies at the forefront of the industry.
• Direct the development and refinement of Retriever-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, combining neural network-based language models with sophisticated information retrieval techniques
• Develop and execute a strategic roadmap for scaling our technology infrastructure and engineering capabilities aligned with the company's goals.
• Collaborate closely with internal teams including product management, product design, UXR, marketing, and revenue, to define and prioritize engineering roadmaps and initiatives.
• Facilitate engineering team in designing and building robust tech architecture stack to support scalable and efficient software development.
• Create and supervise API lifecycle strategies, including design, development, and maintenance of API endpoints.
• Provide world class technical guidance and mentorship across the engineering team, establishing a culture of continuous learning and professional development.
• Stay up-to-date with industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in engineering, machine learning, and AI.

About you

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, with 10+ years experience in software development, including 5+ years in a leadership role.
• 0-1 engineering leadership. Demonstrated experience leading and scaling agile engineering teams and operations at an early-stage company, with a track record of fostering innovation and engineering excellence.
• Proficient in AI and ML techniques such as Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks (TensorFlow, PyTorch), Large Language Models (OpenAI, LLaMA), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Demonstrated ability to select the appropriate supervised or unsupervised learning strategy for a given problem, incorporating advanced techniques like RAG for enhancing model capabilities and data retrieval efficiency.
• In-depth experience with advanced database technologies including vector databases, knowledge graphs, and graph databases, as well as proficiency in both relational and NoSQL databases. Demonstrated ability in evaluating and selecting the most suitable database architecture for various applications, balancing factors like scalability, performance, and data complexity.
• Comprehensive knowledge in software engineering, including expertise in API design, object-oriented programming (OOP), and functional programming. Proficient in languages such as TypeScript and Python, with a strong ability to apply these skills across various software development paradigms.
• Experience in architecting, developing, optimizing, and deploying software for scalable, distributed systems and ML technologies, incorporating DevOps best practices. Strong understanding of cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), ensuring efficient deployment and operations.
• Familiarity with NestJS and blockchain technologies including Ethereum, Solidity, and smart contracts is a plus, but not required.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with a strategic mindset to translate business objectives into technical strategies, engineering roadmaps, and actionable plans.

About the job

• Starting total cash compensation: $375K - $600K DOE.
• Stock options: 1.0% to 2.5% initial grant.
• Eligibility for our Equity Partners program, a profit-sharing system tied to individual and company performance.
• Our Santa Monica HQ is a newly completed state-of-the-art technology development facility offering prodigious open space, open work setup, large recreation & break room with free food, silence / focus facilities, podcasting studio, and sweeping views from the ocean to downtown.
• Full access to premium AI services, including ChatGPT Plus, Gemini Advanced, Perplexity Pro, GitHub Copilot, Midjourney Pro, Anthropic Claude, Notion, and more.
• Full coverage of your home internet and mobile phone plans (Equity Partners program benefit).
• All meals provided free daily, fully stocked kitchen with free food, snacks, coffee and drinks.
• Regular team-building events, dinners and activities.
• Premium health coverage including comprehensive PPO and HMO options, along with full dental and vision coverage, paid 100% for all your dependents.
• Sponsorship for all ongoing education, courses, books and certifications.
• 401K program.
• Empowered, flexible, high trust work culture. Unlimited PTO.
• Relocation assistance available.
• H1B sponsorship available.

Learn more about us at https://demand.io.