Head of AI Engineering — Build Production Agent Platform

HartleyCo; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 520,000; Full time

Job summary

HartleyCo in San Francisco is seeking a senior leader to build and own its AI engineering organization. You will define how production AI agents are built, grow the team, and set the foundations for three future areas: AI infrastructure, agent intelligence and evaluation, and agentic product engineering.

You will lead architecture reviews, guide product strategy with founders, recruit top engineers, and scale an organization from early-stage to high-impact.

Qualifications

• Experience leading an AI/ML engineering group (8–20 people) and hiring engineers and managers.
• Shipped a user-facing LLM or agent product into production within the past two years.
• Experience building production AI agents handling sensitive data and enterprise workflows.
• Strong Python experience; able to contribute to architecture reviews and code reviews.
• Willing to work in person in San Francisco and operate with speed and ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction of the company’s AI products.
• Lead and grow the AI/ML engineering group.
• Recruit exceptional engineers, tech leads, and future managers.
• Set the architecture for production agent systems.
• Improve reliability, latency, and cost while boosting customer adoption.
• Collaborate with founders on product and company strategy.
• Maintain leadership presence in architecture reviews and experiments.
• Build the leadership structure to scale the organization.

Skills

Python

Leadership

AI/ML engineering

Recruiting

AI architecture

Job description

HartleyCo in San Francisco is seeking a senior leader to build and own its AI engineering organization. You will define how production AI agents are built, grow the team, and set the foundations for three future areas: AI infrastructure, agent intelligence and evaluation, and agentic product engineering.

You will lead architecture reviews, guide product strategy with founders, recruit top engineers, and scale an organization from early-stage to high-impact.