Applied AI Lead

Owner.com

2d•$140,000 - $175,000•Remote

About The Position

Owner is the AI growth system for local restaurants. Our AI continuously improves SEO, marketing, and online ordering to grow first-party orders. Unlike other companies that force small business owners to master their software to drive sales, Owner gives them a proven system run by experts. Owner is like having an army of engineers and marketers on your side, just like the big chains. Our vision We’re starting by helping independent restaurants succeed online. But it’s not just restaurants that need our help. Most local businesses are struggling with these same problems. Huge technology corporations are taking their customers, bleeding their profits, and making it hard for them to survive. Once we nail the solution for restaurants – we’ll scale it into every other local business type. In the future we envision, tens of millions of local business owners will use our technology to succeed in the digital age. Read our Series C memo here → Our traction Since 2020, we've generated tens of millions in revenue and processed over half a billion dollars of online orders. 1 in 5 Americans have used an Owner.com website. More importantly, we’ve helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees. Our team Our team is now in the low hundreds. We’ve got top talent from the most successful companies in SMB software, including: Shopify, HubSpot, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Rappi, Faire and Stripe. We’ll be scaling even faster in 2026 to keep pace with our customer growth. Where we work Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto. For a few of our roles we prioritize in-person collaboration at one of our office locations. Most of our teammates are distributed throughout the globe. Please review the role description and discuss with your recruiter for more details on location. Why we’re looking for you We are scaling up Owner’s Applied AI organization. This is going to a fast-paced, high-standards team, working on the most interesting, high-ROI opportunities we can identify across the business. As an Applied AI Operator, you’ll be responsible for end-to-end execution and cross-functional leadership of AI-powered/enabled builds. The role is intended to be a marriage of AI technical development ability and 0-1 business savvy. What we’ve built so far LLM-powered binary classifier for restaurant concept fit with Owner’s product. Ran on over 300k establishments in the US. Hyperpersonalized outbound email engine, sending around 5k unique emails daily with a best-in-class reply rate. Automated pre-call research tool, eliminating the manual work that sales reps previously had to complete before every dial. Increased dial volume by almost double. Gradient Boosted Tree for predicting call pickup rate. Trained on dozens of features across tens of thousands of pieces of data, resulting in up to a ~2.3x increased pickup rate for top-identified leads. (Note: ML experience NOT required for this role, we just used CC to teach us enough ML to build this) Intelligent routing (iRouting) system incorporating our new pickup rate prediction score to optimize lead distribution on a daily basis. This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada. The impact you will have The projects we work on are significant and impactful enough to fundamentally alter the trajectory of the business (i.e. regular driving of double digit improvements to company-wide KPIs). You’ll have the opportunity to lead and execute builds that continue to do so. Our goal for Applied AI is to firmly establish ourselves as a best-in-industry Applied AI team. We need you to help us get there faster. There exists a massive backlog of AI-solvable problems from every team at Owner. Many of these are ambitious enough that they could be standalone products. We’ll provide the tools and resources you need to crush the execution of them end-to-end. Who you’ll work with This role reports to our Applied AI Lead, YG Hong. You will partner with key stakeholders across every team at Owner, including BizOps, RevOps, Sales, Marketing, Growth, Product, Finance, Recruiting, and more. Applied AI focuses exclusively on projects with the highest impact and ROI, which means regular exposure to senior and executive leadership.

Requirements

2+ years of experience building with LLMs - not just enabled by AI coding tools, but functionality integrating the models / APIs themselves. Agents/assistants, structured output, evals, context engineering, etc.
You chase new ideas, your X feed is AI-pilled, and you turn concepts into actual working code.
A history of building for fun, not just for work. The weirder, nicher, and more complex your list of side projects, the better.
3+ years of experience in a 0-1 operations / startup role - we treat every build as a 0-1 problem to solve from scratch.
You move fast, work scrappy, and thrive in the chaos of an early-stage startup environment, especially when things are ambiguous and timelines are tight.
Comfortable taking ambiguity and turning it into a ruthlessly-prioritized roadmap; you don't need a playbook to figure out what to work on next, which is more important than ever, given how easy it is to now build anything one wants.
You dig into root causes until you actually understand the problem, not just the symptoms. You rabbithole, but also know when you’ve gone too deep.
Strong communicator who can break down complex concepts for teammates, both human and AI.