Director of Engineering - AI

Director of Engineering - AI

Mountain View, California, United States

The Company

CommerceIQ is building the AI platform that runs commerce for the world's largest brands. We are not selling AI demos. We are shipping AI agents for content, media, and sales into the workflows of the Fortune 100 every week.

2,200+ Customers - 10 of Top 12CPG Companies - 900+Retailers Connected - $200M+Raised

Customers include Coca-Cola, Nestl, Colgate-Palmolive, Mondelez, Samsung, and Kellogg's. Backed by SoftBank, Insight Partners, and Madrona. Headquartered in Mountain View with teams across the US, India, Canada, and the UK. Pre-IPO.

The Problem:

We have thousands of enterprise users, proven product-market fit across digital shelf analytics, retail media, and sales operations, and the Fortune 100 running on our platform. That part works. Now we are building something new: autonomous AI agents that are already in customer hands and scaling fast. This is a 0-to-1 build inside a company that has the distribution, the data, and the customers to make it real.

The AI Labs team operates as a startup within the company. It needs its own engineering leader. Someone who can recruit a world-class team in Mountain View, set the technical direction for agentic AI in commerce, and ship at a pace that matches the opportunity. We have engineering teams across the US, India, Canada, and the UK. Mountain View is the center of gravity for AI leadership.

This role reports directly to the Founders. We ship with Claude, GPT-4, and open-source models in production. Our engineers already write the majority of code with AI. Some things are great. Some things need to be rebuilt. The next leader will know the difference.

What You'll Do:

Build the Future of Commerce AI

• Architect and evolve the platform for the agentic era. The technical foundation needs to support agents that operate autonomously across content, media, and sales. You will decide what gets built, how it gets built, and what gets thrown away.
• Push the frontier on AI-assisted development. We already lead most companies in AI code contribution. Claude Code, Cursor, and the next generation of agentic dev workflows should be standard across the org. As a startup, we should be ahead of everyone else on this.
• Ship AI agents into production with speed and reliability. Our agents are already in Fortune 100 workflows and scaling fast. Engineering needs to deliver new capabilities on a weekly cadence.
• Be the technical face of the company externally. Our AI Brand positioning depends on engineering leaders who can speak credibly about what we are building. Conference talks, blog posts, recruiting events.

Build the Team

• Recruit and retain world-class engineering talent, starting with Mountain View. You will be measured on the quality of people you bring in and the quality of people you develop.
• Build a strong engineering leadership bench. We need senior leaders who can independently own large surface areas and represent engineering with authority across the company.
• Create an environment where the best engineers want to stay, grow, and recruit their friends. Every hire should raise the average.

Own Engineering Execution

• Own product quality, infrastructure efficiency, and engineering velocity. You set the metrics, you hit them.
• Drive continuous improvement in margins and cost structure. We have already made dramatic improvements in infra costs and product reliability. You will own the next chapter.

What You'll Bring:

This is not a caretaker role. We need a builder. Here is what matters:

• You have built and scaled engineering teams. You have taken a team from good to great. You know how to hire senior talent, develop middle managers, and create a culture where A-players attract more A-players. Ideally you have done this at a pre-IPO company scaling through a similar inflection point.
• You are technical and hands-on. You can go deep on architecture discussions, review technical designs, and earn the respect of senior engineers. You do not need to write code every day, but you need to be able to tell when code is good and when it is not.
• You are AI-native. You personally use AI development tools. You have opinions about LLM orchestration, agent architectures, and how AI changes the software development lifecycle. You are excited about a world where AI writes most of the code and engineers focus on architecture, judgment, and customer impact.
• You operate with urgency. Startup pace. Weekly shipping cadence. You do not tolerate multi-month planning cycles for things that should take days. You bias for action and course-correct fast.
• You are a talent magnet. The best engineers you have worked with want to work with you again. You have a network of strong technical leaders you can bring in. You know the difference between hiring for pedigree and hiring for signal.
• You want to be in the room. This is an onsite role in Mountain View. You will work closely with the Founders, product, and customer success. Our best decisions happen face-to-face.

Compensation and Benefits:

Base: Competitive with top-tier Silicon Valley companies. Commensurate with experience.

Equity: Significant pre-IPO stock options. This is a leadership seat and the equity reflects that. We are at a stage where senior hires still get meaningful ownership.

Benefits: Full medical, dental, vision. 401(k). Unlimited PTO.

Location: Mountain View, CA. Onsite. 15 minutes from Stanford campus.

Why Join Now:

• The window is now. The company has product-market fit, revenue, and customers. The AI Labs team is being built right now. In 12 months this team will be set. The founding members will define the culture, the architecture, and the trajectory. This is that moment.
• Real AI, not AI theater. Most companies are bolting AI onto legacy products and calling it innovation. We are rebuilding the entire platform around autonomous agents. Our agents are already in production, already in customer workflows, already making decisions. If you want to lead a team doing real AI, this is it.
• Fortune 100 scale. Your decisions will directly affect how 2,200+ brands run their ecommerce. The Fortune 100 uses our platform to manage billions of dollars in commerce. This is not a sandbox.

Equity upside. Pre-IPO. $200M+ raised from tier-one investors. The economics of joining at this stage, in this role, are compelling.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other category prohibited by applicable law.