Job description
Location: Remote - United States only.
About the role:
Ottimate is building the AI-native future of accounts payable. Our platform processes millions of invoices across hundreds of enterprise customers, powered by a suite of ML models and agentic workflows. As Director of AI Engineering, you will own the full AI and ML layer of our product — from invoice understanding and vendor intelligence to our conversational AP Copilot and the next generation of autonomous AP agents.
This is a hands-on leadership role. You will spend at least half your time writing code, architecting systems, and driving technical decisions alongside your team. You will also set the AI roadmap, partner cross-functionally with Product, Data, and Platform Engineering, and manage a distributed team of 8–10 engineers across Data and ML.
We are looking for a senior technical manager or director — ideally someone who has thrived at a smaller company and is ready for a career step up into broader ownership. If you are energized by shipping real AI products, working with noisy real-world financial data, and building the systems that will define how enterprises automate AP, this role is for you.
Responsibilities
Technical Leadership
Architect and ship production AI/ML systems — you write code, not just review it
Own the AI roadmap end-to-end: prioritization, trade-offs, delivery
Set technical standards for model quality, evals, observability, and reliability
Drive adoption of agentic coding tools to multiply team velocity
Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or equivalent — measure and improve PR throughput
Partner with Platform Engineering on infrastructure, data pipelines, and APIs
People & Cross-Functional
Manage a distributed team of 8–10 engineers across Data and ML disciplines
Hire, develop, and retain engineers at all levels; build a high-trust remote culture
Partner with Product on roadmap sequencing and scope trade-offs
Work directly with customer-facing teams to close feedback loops on model quality
Communicate AI capabilities and limitations clearly to non-technical stakeholders
Model & Systems Ownership
Own model performance metrics and drive continuous improvement pipelines
Build and maintain evals frameworks — regression suites, human review, A/B testing
Oversee training data collection, curation, and labeling operations
Manage the full ML lifecycle: experimentation, deployment, monitoring, iteration
Define and enforce quality bars for agentic workflows entering production
Requirements
Applied AI & Agentic Systems
Production agentic pipelines using frontier models
Anthropic SDK · OpenAI SDK · tool use, function calling, multi-agent orchestration
Reliable agent loop design — planning, memory, tool execution, error recovery
RAG pipeline design — chunking, embedding models, retrieval tuning, reranking
Evals frameworks built from scratch — correctness, regression, semantic similarity
Observability for production AI — tracing, cost tracking, latency, failure analysis
Model Expertise
Fine-tuning frontier or open-source models for domain-specific tasks
LoRA, QLoRA, instruction tuning — not just off-the-shelf API calls
Training data collection, curation, cleaning, and labeling at scale
LLM inference and serving optimization
vLLM, TGI, or equivalent
Model selection trade-offs — cost, latency, capability, context window
Engineering Depth
Hands-on Python — comfortable writing, reviewing, and shipping production code
PostgreSQL — schema design, query optimization, indexing strategies
Distributed systems — async workers, queues, retries, state machines
Celery or similar async task frameworks is a bonus
Public-facing API design — REST, versioning, developer experience
MCP server development — tool-accessible APIs for AI agent integration
AWS or cloud infrastructure — enough to own AI workload deployments
Ideal Career Background
Engineering Manager ready for director-level ownership
Has led technical teams at a startup or growth-stage company — knows how to move fast
Hands-on contributor who has also managed small high performance teams.
Comfortable owning outcomes
★ Industry Experience
Finance and/or AP domain — invoice workflows, GL coding, vendor management
Hospitality — high-volume, multi-location AP operations
Noisy, unstructured text data — OCR outputs, inconsistent supplier formats, entity resolution at scale
★ Industry experience above is a bonus
Exceptional AI engineering skills are the primary bar. We will teach the domain.
Benefits
We care deeply about making Ottimate an incredible place to work and invest a significant amount of time and energy into creating and maintaining a company culture that provides our team with a generous level of support whilst inspiring them to do their best work.
The specific benefits/perks we offer are continually evolving, but currently include:
Compensation: 200,000-225,000 + 15% Annual Bonus + Equity
Competitive salary based on skills & experience.
Medical, Dental, Vision and other Company-Subsidized Benefits for you and your family.
Employer sponsored 401(k) with company match.
Paid Time Off (and the encouragement to use it).
Annual company retreats.
Promote from within philosophy.
Beyond the tangible benefits though:
You will be part of a growing team, at a pinnacle moment of scale for the business, and experience the excitement of working in a startup where each action makes a huge difference.
You will have the agency to solve difficult problems creatively, the freedom to explore work that inspires you, and infrastructure to ensure you're constantly challenged and developing.
You will work with sharp, passionate teammates solving some of the most unique challenges and positioning our product as a premier finance automation solution.
Our commitment to empowering a diverse and inclusive workforce, celebrating differences, and creating a safe space for our employees to bring their whole selves to work is second to note.
We are transforming entire industries using innovative technology including Artificial Intelligence, Payment Tech, and Neural Networks.
Our leaders lead with a people-first approach; inspiring excellence, nurturing ideas, and finding creative ways to eliminate obstacles for cultivating growth.
We truly love what we do and who we do it with - and we think you will too!
Ottimate is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion. We do not discriminate based on race, color, national origin, religion, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability status, or marital status. If you are excited about the role but do not meet 100% of the qualifications listed above, we encourage you to apply. Nothing in this job posting should be construed as an offer or guarantee of employment.
This job description is intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by employees assigned to this position. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, qualifications, or working conditions associated with the position. Employees may be required to perform other job-related duties as assigned to meet business needs. Nothing in this job description creates a contract of employment, alters the at-will employment relationship where applicable, or guarantees any specific terms or conditions of employment. The Company reserves the right to modify this job description at any time, with or without notice, subject to applicable federal, state, and local law.
Originally posted on Himalayas
Who can apply
Eligible countries: United States. Accepted UTC offsets: UTC-10, UTC-9, UTC-8, UTC-7, UTC-6, UTC-5, UTC+14. Review the full description for employer-specific work authorization, residency and schedule requirements.