Senior Director of AI, R&D & Agentic Systems

Role Overview
As Senior Director of AI, you will serve as the primary architect of QuillBot’s intelligence layer, leading the evolution from a suite of AI tools to a unified, agent-driven AI-native creative platform. We are at an inflection point, transitioning rapidly from a collection of discrete capabilities into a cohesive system where users can move seamlessly from high-level intent to fully realized outputs across writing, research, and design.
You will define and build the orchestration systems that unify QuillBot’s products into cohesive, multi-step workflows—enabling intelligent systems to plan, coordinate, and execute complex creative tasks. This role will define how intelligence is integrated across every QuillBot product experience.
Reporting to the VP of AI, you will lead both AI R&D and Applied AI teams, shaping the model stack, agentic infrastructure, and production systems that power tens of millions of users. This role operates at the intersection of research, AI alignment, systems architecture, and product strategy, requiring technical depth, execution velocity, and the ability to drive alignment across Engineering, Product, and executive leadership.
This role sits within QuillBot’s senior leadership team and carries significant influence over QuillBot’s technical direction, strategy, and tactical execution.
In your first six months, you will:

• Ship and iterate on production agentic workflows connecting QuillBot's core tools and surfaces, proving the orchestration architecture under real user load
• Make high-conviction technical bets on the model stack, compute strategy, and agent execution model, with written rationale that the org can build against
• Own the technical point of view on which ICP verticals and workflows justify agentic investment, and drive that conviction into AI, product, and engineering planning
• Inherit and reshape the AI org to match the velocity and scope of what we're building, including hiring where gaps exist

Responsibilities

• Design and lead systems for intent recognition, task decomposition, and multi-step execution across QuillBot’s product surfaces
• Define how agentic systems plan, coordinate, and execute workflows across a multi-surface application suite
• Establish standards for agent-native infrastructure, enabling product surfaces to be machine-readable and executable

• Lead research and development across text and multimodal domains, with an initial focus on text and image capabilities
• Build on QuillBot’s existing strengths in NLP while extending into new modalities to create differentiated product experiences
• Make model strategy decisions across proprietary and third-party systems, balancing capability, cost, and shipping velocity

• Drive the shipping cadence for model updates, MLOps, and data pipelines across high-scale production
• Own system reliability and performance of the AI stack serving tens of millions of users worldwide
• Balance system performance, latency, and cost through informed decisions on compute economics and architecture

• Build and lead an integrated AI organization spanning R&D and Applied AI teams
• Partner with the VP of AI and senior leadership to define technical direction, evaluate trade-offs, and guide platform-level decisions
• Drive alignment across Engineering, Product, and Design to ensure adoption of agent-native standards
• Raise the quality bar across the organization, acting as a force multiplier for team performance and execution
• Architect the team's operating model around AI-native workflows, using automated pipelines, code generation, and internal tooling to achieve output disproportionate to headcount

Qualifications

• Experience building and shipping agentic systems or orchestration platforms in production at meaningful scale, not prototypes or research demos
• Distributed Agency: deep expertise coordinating diverse agent populations (plan-based, scripted, and hybrid) within stateful environments, including task decomposition, intent routing, and multi-step execution
• State & Persistence: proven ability to design and operate systems that maintain sustained, context-aware agency across multi-session and multi-domain workflows
• Compute Economics: ability to optimize sophisticated planning logic against the constraints of latency, unit economics, and reliability at consumer scale
• Background in NLP and/or multimodal AI (text and image preferred), with the ability to guide applied research, evaluate model architectures, and make binding technical decisions on model strategy across proprietary and third-party ecosystems

• Proven leadership of both AI R&D and Applied AI/MLOps teams within consumer product environments serving millions of users
• Track record of scaling AI systems and infrastructure from early-stage builds (0→1) into high-scale production (1→10), not just inheriting mature platforms
• Forms strong technical opinions quickly, updates them based on evidence rather than consensus, and translates AI capabilities into product direction and business impact
• Has built or reshaped AI organizations to match the demands of a rapidly evolving technical mandate, including hiring, restructuring, and raising the performance bar

• Drives alignment across Engineering, Product, and executive stakeholders through technical credibility and strategic clarity, not positional authority
• Operates effectively across global distributed teams and time zones

Bonus Points

• Experience with agent-to-tool communication frameworks or emerging standards (e.g., MCP, agent SDKs)
• Contributions to peer-reviewed research or involvement in the broader AI research community
• Experience with browser-based or edge compute environments (e.g., WebGPU)
• Background in creative, productivity, or prosumer software platforms
• Experience operating in founder-led or highly entrepreneurial environments

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive salary and annual bonus
• Medical coverage, including full dental and vision
• Retirement savings plans
• Life and disability benefits
• Vacation & leaves of absence
• Annual family planning stipend
• Social responsibility program (volunteer time off and donation matching)
• Developmental opportunities through education & developmental reimbursements & professional workshops
• Maternity & parental leave
• Hybrid & remote model with flexible working hours
• On-site & remote company events throughout the year
• Annual wellness stipend
• Monthly tech stipend
• Employee referral program
• Premium access to QuillBot

*Benefits and benefit amounts differ by region. A comprehensive list applicable to your region will be provided in your interview process. 

For positions in San Francisco, CA, and other locations where required, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Other locations: IL, MA, NJ.
Research shows that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds often don't apply for roles if they don't meet all the criteria. We strongly encourage you to apply if you're interested: we'd love to learn how you can amplify our team with your unique experience!
This role is eligible for hire in the US.
We are a virtual-first company and have employees dispersed throughout the United States, Canada, India, Germany, and the Netherlands. We have a market-based pay structure that varies by location. The base pay for this position is dependent on multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed. You may also be eligible to participate in our bonus program and may be offered benefits, and other types of compensation.
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