Director of AI

About Bambee
Small businesses employ most of the American workforce, and almost none of them have HR. Bambee fixes that: every customer gets a dedicated HR Manager plus software that handles policies, handbooks, terminations, performance, and compliance. Right now we're building Bambee 2.0 — an intelligence-driven platform where AI doesn't decorate the product, it runs through the center of it. That's where you come in.

The Role
You will own the AI function at Bambee — the models, the architecture, the roadmap, and the small team that builds it. Intelligence is one of the three things this company's executive team tracks weekly, alongside the operating plan and our capital strategy. Your work is reviewed at that table, and your progress is reported to the CEO's office every week. This is a builder's directorship: you will spend more time in the work than in meetings about the work.

You will collaborate directly with the VP of Product & Intelligence as well as the CEO, and you'll work in person with the product and engineering teams in our Los Angeles office five days a week. We're building fast, together, in one room. If that sentence made you more excited, not less, keep reading.

What You'll Do
Own the AI roadmap for Bambee — what we build, in what order, and why — and defend those calls with evidence.
Design and ship the intelligence behind Bambee's HR guidance: systems that help small business owners handle real situations — a termination, a policy question, an audit — with speed and judgment.
Build the evaluation discipline: every model and agent we ship gets measured for accuracy, safety, and usefulness before a customer sees it, and monitored after.
Set the technical direction on model selection, training, fine-tuning, retrieval, and agent architecture — and change it when the evidence says to.
Hire and lead a small team of AI engineers as the function grows; until then, be the strongest builder on it.
Work with HR Managers and service teams to turn their expertise into product intelligence — they are the domain experts; your systems make their judgment available to every customer.
Report progress weekly in writing to the executive team: what shipped, what moved, what's blocked, what you need.
Keep us honest on AI safety, privacy, and customer trust — our customers hand us their hardest employment problems, and the intelligence we build has to deserve that.

What You Bring
You've shipped production AI/ML systems that real customers depend on — not prototypes, not demos.
Strong knowledge of predictive models and machine learning architectures.
Deep, current fluency with LLMs: prompting, fine-tuning, retrieval, evaluation, and agentic systems — and strong opinions about when each is the wrong answer.
You've led engineers before, or you're clearly ready to — people follow your technical judgment.
You can explain a model decision to a CEO, a product manager, and an HR Manager in their own language, in one meeting.
Bias for shipping. You'd rather put something real in front of users this month than something perfect next quarter.
Comfort with ambiguity and ownership — you'll define much of this role yourself.

Nice to Have
Experience in HR tech, legal tech, fintech, or another domain where being wrong has consequences.
Experience building AI products for small businesses or non-technical users.
You've been employee #1–5 on an AI team and lived the zero-to-one.

How We Work
This is a full-time, in-office role at our Los Angeles headquarters. The executive team runs on a written operating cadence — weekly updates, clear owners, decisions on dates — and the AI function is a first-class part of it. You'll always know where your work stands and what it unlocks.
Bambee is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.