Role: Head of AI / Principal AI Architect / ML Engineer / Data Scientist San Francisco (Hybrid) Position Type: Full-Time (Permanent or Contract) Urgency: URGENT Start Date: ASAP Team Size: High-agency founding team working at the cutting edge of agentic and multi-modal AI Compensation & Terms Base Salary: $200,000 $350,000 (dependent on experience and level) Equity: ~2% (flexible based on final role and comp level) Visa Support: Not available Sign-On Bonus: Not mentioned Interview-to-Offer Turnaround: Varies based on scheduling Role Summary Join a YC-backed, high-growth fintech startup transforming the $1.25T private wealth industry with AI. As Head of AI or Principal AI Architect, youll lead the development of foundational model architectures and agentic systems used for financial planning, recommendation, and autonomous analysis. Work directly with the CEO and CTO to bring to life generative copilots, retrieval-augmented advisors, and multi-modal assistants built with LLMs, advanced prompting, and orchestration strategies. Key Responsibilities Architect and scale generative AI systems for financial reasoning and planning Build RAG pipelines to retrieve financial knowledge from structured/unstructured sources Design autonomous agents to power user-facing workflows and copilot experiences Apply advanced prompting strategies (Tree of Thoughts, Constitutional AI, Agent protocol) Collaborate cross-functionally with product, business, and engineering stakeholders Candidate Must-Haves Hands-on experience building or fine-tuning LLMs or foundation models Experience at a top AI lab or foundation model org (e.g., OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, FAIR) PhD (or equivalent) in AI/ML from a top institution (e.g., Stanford, MIT, CMU, Berkeley) Technical depth in: LLMs (e.g., GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA 3) RAG optimization & hybrid search Multi-modal systems (text + voice) Agent orchestration for financial planning or similar use cases Startup-style work ethic (9am-9pm, 6 days/week) Comfortable working with non-technical teams Strongly Preferred Publications in NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, CVPR Fintech or financial modeling experience Led AI/ML research teams or zero-to-one product builds Familiarity with Python, TypeScript, Claude, LLaMA, DynamoDB, AWS Work Model & Environment Location: San Francisco (in-office 3 days/week) Hybrid Schedule: Yes 3 days onsite Culture: Intense, high-agency, deep technical collaboration Client Impact: Consumer-facing product already in use with six-figure revenue