Director of Engineering – AI Agents

Location - San Francisco, CA (On-site) - Full-time, 5 days/week in-office in San Francisco.

Compensation - $300,000 – $450,000 Base + Competitive Equity

Visa - Open to Visa Sponsorship (H1B, TN)

Company Stage - Series A / High-Growth Startup

Industry - Artificial Intelligence, Agentic AI, Insurance Technology, Enterprise Software, B2B SaaS

About the Company

FurtherAI is building a domain-specific AI platform for the insurance industry, helping insurers, reinsurers, MGAs, and brokers automate complex workflows that traditionally require significant manual effort.

Backed by top investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator, Nexus, South Park Commons, and Converge, FurtherAI has raised approximately $30M and supports customers writing more than $15B in premiums across all 50 US states.

The company's AI Workspace automates workflows including submission intake, policy comparisons, underwriting audits, and other complex insurance operations. Rather than providing a generic AI assistant, FurtherAI builds deeply specialized AI systems that understand insurance-specific processes and workflows.

The company is growing rapidly and operates with a highly entrepreneurial culture where engineering, product, and go-to-market teams work closely together. Everyone is expected to take ownership beyond their formal job description, work directly with customers, and move quickly from problem identification to production deployment.

As Director of Engineering – AI Agents, you'll own and scale the company's entire AI engineering organization. You'll define the technical direction for production AI agents, build the engineering organization beneath you, and remain deeply involved in architecture and code while shaping the future of AI-powered insurance workflows.

This is an opportunity to join a high-growth AI company at a critical stage and build an AI organization from the ground up.

What You'll Do

• Own and scale FurtherAI's entire AI engineering organization
• Build the AI organization into three core teams: AI Infrastructure, Agent Intelligence, and Agentic Products
• Define the technical architecture and long-term strategy for production AI agents
• Lead development of AI infrastructure focused on model routing, reliability, and production performance
• Build agent intelligence systems including evaluation frameworks, shared tools, and multimodal pipelines
• Lead development of customer-facing AI assistants and long-running agentic workflows
• Design and implement multi-agent orchestration systems for complex insurance workflows
• Establish reliable model routing and inference architectures across different LLM providers
• Build evaluation systems that measure agent quality, reliability, accuracy, and production performance
• Develop multimodal AI pipelines capable of processing complex insurance information
• Ensure AI agents operate reliably in real customer environments involving high-value insurance workflows
• Recruit, mentor, and retain a world-class AI engineering organization
• Hire and develop engineering leaders who can eventually own individual AI teams
• Establish engineering standards, architecture practices, and technical operating principles across the AI organization
• Remain deeply technical and actively participate in system architecture, design, and code
• Work closely with the founders and product leadership to shape company-wide technical direction
• Partner directly with customers and internal teams to understand difficult AI use cases
• Translate customer problems into scalable AI systems and product capabilities
• Push the technical frontier of what AI agents can accomplish in insurance
• Balance rapid experimentation with production reliability and engineering rigor
• Build systems capable of handling increasingly complex, long-running, and multimodal workflows
• Help define the technical roadmap as FurtherAI scales beyond its current product and customer base

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience
• Significant experience building production AI/ML systems
• Experience leading engineering teams or organizations
• Experience building and scaling teams from an early-stage environment
• Experience building production LLM-powered applications or agentic systems
• Experience owning technical architecture for complex AI products
• Experience with AI agents, multi-agent systems, or agent orchestration
• Experience building systems that operate reliably in production
• Experience working closely with product and business leadership
• Experience hiring and developing high-performing engineering teams
• Strong hands-on engineering background with the ability to remain technically involved
• Experience operating in high-growth startups or highly entrepreneurial environments
• Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous technical problems into scalable systems

Technical Requirements

• Deep understanding of modern LLM architectures and production AI systems
• Strong Python engineering experience
• Experience designing multi-agent orchestration systems
• Experience with model routing and LLM infrastructure
• Experience building evaluation frameworks for AI agents
• Experience with AI reliability, monitoring, and production evaluation
• Experience with multimodal AI pipelines
• Strong distributed systems and backend engineering fundamentals
• Experience designing scalable AI infrastructure
• Experience building long-running agentic workflows
• Strong understanding of LLM inference and production deployment
• Experience with model providers, APIs, or AI infrastructure platforms
• Strong software architecture and system design capabilities
• Experience building AI systems that interact with real customer workflows
• Ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs across models, infrastructure, latency, cost, and reliability

Education

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or related technical field preferred
• Strong computer science fundamentals
• Advanced technical depth in AI systems, distributed systems, or software architecture

Soft Skills

• Exceptional technical leadership
• Strong engineering judgment
• High ownership mentality
• Excellent communication skills
• Strong hiring and organizational leadership ability
• Comfortable remaining hands-on technically
• High execution velocity
• Comfortable operating without a predefined playbook
• Strong product intuition
• Customer-obsessed mindset
• Low-ego collaborative leadership style
• Comfortable working directly with founders and executives
• Ability to make decisions quickly in ambiguous environments
• Strong entrepreneurial mentality
• Ability to inspire and develop high-performing technical teams
• Comfortable working in a high-intensity startup environment

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $300,000 – $450,000
• Competitive Equity Package
• Health Insurance
• Dental Insurance
• In-office Lunch
• Unlimited PTO
• Opportunity to build and lead the company's AI engineering organization
• Direct access to founders and executive leadership
• Significant influence over product and technical strategy
• Opportunity to build production AI agents for a massive enterprise market
• Exposure to cutting-edge LLM, agentic AI, and multimodal technologies
• Opportunity to hire and develop the next generation of AI engineering leaders
• High ownership in a rapidly scaling, venture-backed AI company

Why Join

This is a rare opportunity to become the engineering leader responsible for building and scaling an entire AI organization at a rapidly growing AI company.

You'll shape the architecture behind production AI agents that automate critical insurance workflows while building the teams, systems, and technical culture required to scale the organization through its next stage of growth.

You'll work directly with founders, customers, and engineering leaders while remaining deeply technical and having an outsized influence on product direction.

If you enjoy building AI systems that work in the real world, leading high-performing engineering organizations, staying close to the technology, and operating with true founder-level ownership, this role offers exceptional technical scope and leadership impact.