Director of Engineering - AI

CommerceIQ • Mountain View, California, United States • 1m ago

Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs

This Director of Engineering role sits at the intersection of SaaS platform building and applied AI, with a clear mandate to move beyond prototypes into production-grade capability. The remit spans architecture, infrastructure, and real customer-facing delivery, which is where many AI initiatives in SaaS either prove durable or stall. Direct partnership with founders also signals that AI is being treated as a core product direction rather than a side project.

For a SaaS engineering leader, the career upside is the chance to own the full lifecycle of an AI platform: establishing ML systems, operationalizing model training and deployment, and creating feedback loops through monitoring and iteration. The emphasis on measurable business impact mirrors how modern SaaS teams justify platform investment, and the exposure to agentic applications builds a transferable toolkit as more SaaS products embed autonomous workflows.

This role fits a player-coach who prefers to stay technically close to the work while building the first layers of an engineering organization. It will suit someone comfortable making architectural calls with incomplete information, aligning stakeholders across product and data science, and setting standards that enable repeatable delivery. Onsite expectations also favor leaders who value high-touch collaboration during an incubation phase.

The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.

Job Description

The Role:

We're looking for an Engineering Leader with a Data Science / Machine Learning background to head the incubation of CommerceIQ’s next generation of AI-driven SaaS solutions. The Head of AI Engineering is both hands-on and leadership-focused: you will act as a player-coach, directly shaping the technical architecture of our AI platform while building and mentoring a team of engineers.

You will report directly to our cofounders to design and deliver advanced AI and agentic applications that push the boundaries of what is possible in applied AI for commerce. You will be accountable for scaling AI systems from research through production, ensuring that they create measurable business impact for the world’s largest brands.

This role is ideal for a technical leader who has both trained models and shipped them into production, built agentic applications, and has a deep understanding of machine learning systems at scale.

This is an onsite role based out our Mountain View, CA headquarters. You will be expected to work from the office Monday-Friday if hired.

What You'll Do:

Partner directly with the cofounders to set and execute the AI engineering strategy.
Hire, lead, and mentor a founding AI engineering team within our incubation group, growing both technical depth and organizational capability.
Act as a player-coach: contribute hands-on to architecture, model training, and backend engineering while scaling a team around you.
Design and build scalable ML infrastructure to support model training, fine-tuning, deployment, and monitoring at production scale.
Lead the development of agentic applications, including designing, training, and launching agents that operate in real-world customer environments.
Establish best practices for data quality, labeling, and ML pipelines, enabling rapid experimentation and continuous improvement.
Drive responsible AI development by ensuring reliability, ethics, safety, and performance in all models and agents shipped to production.
Collaborate closely with product, data science, and business stakeholders to translate research breakthroughs into customer-facing features.
Set engineering standards and build a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and accountability.

What You'll Bring:

8-10 years of experience in backend software engineering, with 2+ years leading AI/ML teams.Hands-on experience training AI/ML models, including foundation models, fine-tuned models, or specialized domain models.
Proven experience building and deploying agentic applications, with deep knowledge of agent design patterns and orchestration.
Strong track record of launching AI models and agents into production environments at scale.
Advanced expertise in machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning.
Experience designing scalable data systems and pipelines for training and inference.
Fluency in backend and ML-oriented programming languages such as Python, Java, Scala, or C++.
Knowledge of modern ML toolkits and frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, LangChain, Ray, etc.).
Strong ability to balance hands-on technical depth with leadership, mentoring, and organizational building.
Excellent communication and influencing skills, with experience working directly with senior executives or founders.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field.

Compensation and Benefits:

The typical base pay range for this role is: $250,000 - $300,000/per year. In addition to salary, there is a 20% annual bonus, along with an equity package provided as high potential pre-IPO stock options.

This base pay range may be inclusive of several career levels at CommerceIQ and will be narrowed based on a number of factors including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location.

Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package at CommerceIQ. You may also be eligible for long-term incentives, in the form of company stock options, as well as potential discretionary bonuses. You will also receive access to: