Director of Engineering - AI Agents at Recruiting From Scratch
San Francisco, CA
$300,000–$450,000from the description
Aug 10, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Series A AI startup building insurance-automation software is hiring a Director of Engineering to own and grow its entire AI engineering organization. The role spans people leadership — recruiting and developing three sub-teams covering AI infrastructure, agent intelligence, and agentic products — and deep hands-on technical work: designing multi-agent orchestration systems, LLM routing and inference architecture, evaluation frameworks, and multimodal pipelines. The ideal candidate has a strong production AI/ML background and is comfortable operating at both the organizational and code level in a high-growth startup.
Principal level · 7+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 160 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (computer and information systems managers). range 35–250
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $238,011 (middle half $208,323–$320,108). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 12, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
This role sits at the boundary between a senior people-manager (11-3021) and a deeply hands-on technical leader (15-1252). The posting explicitly requires the candidate to 'remain deeply technical and actively participate in system architecture, design, and code,' which is atypical for a pure management role — hence the alt SOC.
The degree requirement is listed as 'preferred' ('Bachelor's degree … preferred'), so it is not treated as a hard gate.
All technical requirements are drawn from the 'Technical Requirements' section, which functions as a hard-requirements block. Soft-skill and experience bullets were not converted into skills, per extraction rules.
The posting does not name specific model providers, cloud platforms, or orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, AWS, OpenAI) beyond generic references, so no such tools are listed.
Seniority is assessed as Principal rather than Senior because the role owns the entire AI engineering organization, reports to founders, and is responsible for building and structuring multiple sub-teams — genuine org-wide technical and leadership authority, not a single-team senior IC or manager.
Ignored 2 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): multi-agent orchestration, AI reliability / production monitoring.
Read the full posting
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