AI and Automations Lead

Our Firm
Companies and investment firms built today are scaling faster than at any time in history, but the founders and investors building the defining businesses of our era face a paradox: the more value they create, the faster the demands and complexity of their own financial lives compound. Santa Barbara Management was founded by a small group of accomplished business builders and investors who lived this problem first-hand and decided to solve it. To make this vision a reality, we have reimagined the family office experience from first principles, relentlessly questioning industry norms.

At Santa Barbara Management, we engineer wealth for exceptional builders and their families. Our innovative model has been painstakingly designed to deliver a fully-integrated, client-aligned solution that combines investments, tax, trusts and estates, financial operations, and strategic finance under one roof, within one team. We have built our firm to be the trusted advisory platform we wish we had as we navigated some of the most complex and consequential financial decisions of our lives.

Today, we serve some of the most accomplished founders and investors of our time – and we're just getting started.

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.

We're hiring an AI-native builder to systematically identify every workflow in the firm that does not require human judgment and replace it with software, automation, or AI agents that execute it faster, more accurately, and more consistently than any person could. You will own this transformation end-to-end – the roadmap, the build, and the adoption – and you will measure your success by a single question: how much time has SBM's team of advisors and technical specialists reclaimed that can be redeployed towards the highest return-on-judgment and return-on-experience activities?

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