AI & Automation Strategy Lead

Santa Barbara Management; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 150,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job description

The Role

One of SBM's most important competitive advantages is the quality of its people: tax specialists, trusts and estates attorneys, investment professionals, and advisors whose judgment and expertise are genuinely rare. In our industry, even the best people spend inordinate amounts of time on mechanical execution: pulling data, filling forms, producing reports, moving information between systems. Every hour spent that way erodes the return the firm earns on its most valuable assets: judgment and experience. Technology can now reliably execute work that required a person twelve months ago, and the frontier is moving in real time. We believe the future of family offices will be built by the firms who successfully deploy technology to enable skilled, highly-trained professionals to focus on their highest impact work.

What You'll Do

Own the Roadmap and the Tech Stack

• Partner with senior leadership to develop and execute an ambitious strategy of building and deploying AI in a complex, people-driven, services category underpenetrated by technology
• Transform discovery and deep understanding of business context into a technology roadmap for SBM's automation and agent layer
• Own the suite of internal tools at SBM, ensuring that everything we build or buy fits into a coherent, integrated architecture
• Treat security as foundational – data access, model permissions, and audit trails are integrated into what you build by default

Ship Technology that the Team Depends On

• Move from discovery to deployed product fast with the understanding that the standard is not an interesting prototype, but a tool the team uses every day
• Embed with SBM's client teams and functional specialists to understand workflows at the task level – how long they take, how often they recur, and what judgment they actually require – and build in close collaboration with end users on a daily basis
• Target workflows that consume the most execution time across the firm and devise technology-first solutions that change how SBM operates
• Select the right approach for each problem across custom applications built on frontier models, workflow automation platforms, direct API integrations, or combinations thereof and own every deployed tool end-to-end from build through maintenance
• Onboard the team on every new automation, gather real feedback after launch, and iterate quickly

Operate at the AI Frontier

• Maintain hands-on command of developments in AI agents, frontier models, and automation tooling
• Run fast, time-boxed experiments on promising new capabilities and produce clear go/no-go recommendations, not open-ended explorations
• Serve as SBM's internal authority on what AI agents can and cannot do today, so the firm makes well-calibrated bets rather than underinvesting in what is proven or overbuilding on foundations that aren't stable

Who You Are

You are a builder who ships. Your default answer to uncertainty is a fast experiment, not a longer planning cycle, and you treat working software as the only meaningful unit of progress. You have shipped tools that real teams depend on, and you know the difference between a demo that impresses and systems that become business-critical infrastructure.

You are AI-native in the fullest sense. AI has fundamentally transformed the way that you build products, and you are consistently experimenting with new tools and ways of doing things. You have hands-on fluency with agent frameworks and frontier models, and genuine curiosity about what's next.

You think in systems, seeing individual automations as components of a larger architecture, and you have the humility to know that automations built without deep understanding of the workflows they replace tend to fail. So you do the discovery, sit with the people doing the work, and earn adoption rather than assume it. Most importantly, you are energized by the scale of the ambition here: a firm full of exceptional people, a category still running on manual execution, and an opportunity to remake a large, growing, analog industry. You want to be the person who puts those three things together.

What We Look For

We're open to several backgrounds — what matters most is a track record of shipping real software that teams rely on daily, hands-on fluency with frontier models and agent frameworks, and the judgment to know what today's tooling can reliably do in production. Strong candidates will likely come from one of these paths:

• A software engineer who has spent the last two years building with AI in production — agents, LLM applications, or automation systems — and wants ownership of an entire firm's transformation rather than a slice of a roadmap
• A forward-deployed or solutions engineer who has embedded with non-technical teams, translated messy real-world workflows into deployed software, and owned adoption, not just delivery
• A technical founder or early startup builder who has owned the full cycle — discovery, build, ship, iterate — with the scar tissue to prove it

Whatever your path, you should be comfortable working directly with non-technical colleagues, making decisions with 70-80% of the information, and owning every tool you ship until it is retired. This is a role for someone who wants to define what an AI-native professional services firm looks like — and build it.

What We Offer

• Opportunity to Build Something Different: Santa Barbara Management is reimagining a large, under-innovated category of financial services. The people who join us now will help shape how we serve our clients, how we build our platform, what this firm becomes and will have an opportunity to help redefine how this industry works.
• Exceptional Colleagues: Join an ambitious and exceptionally talented team led by people who have built category-leading businesses before. The bar is high, and that's the point. We move quickly, are highly collaborative, and care deeply about creating an environment where we make each other better every day.
• Meaningful Scope, Real Impact: SBM is growing quickly. There are no small roles, there's no entrenched hierarchy, and the opportunities for professional growth are real.
• A Culture That Takes Care of Its People: Competitive compensation, medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k), paid parental leave for all parents, unlimited paid vacation, and an annual learning and development stipend. We apply the same standard of excellence to how we treat our team as we do to how we serve our clients.
• The Conditions to Do Your Best Work: This role is based in our Chicago office. We work together in person four days a week because the best ideas and the strongest cultures are built in the same room. We also trust our people to manage their time and energy like the professionals they are.

Compensation at SBM reflects the unique background and experience each person brings to the role. The expected base salary range for this position is $150,000-$175,000. Beyond base salary, you will be eligible for a discretionary annual bonus which, for high performers, can represent a substantial part of total compensation.

Santa Barbara Management is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or any other legally protected status. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any of the above characteristics. Santa Barbara Management is enrolled in E-Verify to confirm the identity and employment eligibility of all new employees.

We are not accepting candidate submissions from external recruiting firms or agencies for this role at this time.