Director of AI & Automation

Native Pet

About The Position

Native Pet is re-imagining pet nutrition for a new generation of pet parents. We make dog-approved supplements to help consumers nourish their pets. Our clean-label products, developed with leading veterinary nutritionists, leverage whole food and superfood ingredients backed by clinical research to deliver real, functional health benefits. We are in high growth mode as we scale across the digital and retail landscapes. Our ambition is to be the global leader in the pet consumables category. Role Overview: Native Pet is seeking a Head of AI Automation to lead the technical strategy and execution of our internal efficiency initiatives. This is a high-impact full-stack engineering role working directly with the CEO to modernize how our business operates. This role is "hands-on keyboard," meaning you will be accountable for leading the strategy while also executing the development. You will be responsible for architecting and building automated systems that support our core business functions—Marketing, Product Innovation, Operations, and Finance. Your objective is to leverage Artificial Intelligence and automation tools to reduce manual workload, improve data accuracy, and accelerate decision-making across the company.

Requirements

Workflow Orchestration: Deep expertise in automation and orchestration is required. Whether you prefer n8n, Make, Airflow, or custom Python scripts, you must be capable of architecting complex, branching workflows with robust error handling.
Programming: Strong proficiency in Python (for data processing and backend logic) and JavaScript/TypeScript (for web integrations).
AI Integration: Experience working with Large Language Models (OpenAI, Anthropic) via API. You should understand how to structure data and prompts to get consistent, reliable outputs for business tasks.
Data Engineering: Proficiency in SQL and JSON manipulation. You must be comfortable structuring data for use in financial and operational reporting.
Business-First Mindset: You understand that code is a means to an end. You evaluate every project based on the time it saves or the value it creates for the business.
Cross-Functional Fluency: You can speak "Marketing" with the Growth team and "Margins" with the Finance team, translating their needs into technical solutions.
Rapid Prototyping: You are comfortable using AI coding assistants (such as GitHub Copilot or Claude Code) to accelerate development and deployment.
Detail-Oriented: When dealing with financial or inventory data, you understand that accuracy is paramount. You build verification steps into your workflows to ensure data integrity

Responsibilities

Enterprise-Wide Automation - You will collaborate with various business functions to develop tools and automations, leveraging AI and automation to enhance efficiency and productivity across the organization. This initiative aims to help us achieve more with fewer resources. Example project types may include:
Marketing & Growth: Automate complex workflows such as automated competitor research, programmatic paid media content generation, and personalized customer communication based on purchasing behavior.
Finance & Operations: Streamline back-office functions, including automated invoice processing, real-time inventory alerts, and synchronizing data between our supply chain and financial reporting tools.
Product Innovation: Accelerate R&D by building tools that can aggregate and summarize research data, analyze market trends, and organize product formulation notes.
Data Architecture & Contextual AI: Collaborate with the data team to scale our data pipelines and architecture for AI tools. Crucially, utilize our proprietary data to build context and enhance the effectiveness of our AI applications.
Unified Data Syncing: Design and maintain pipelines that sync data from disparate sources (Shopify, ERP, Marketing Platforms) into a centralized architecture.
Query-Ready Infrastructure: Ensure internal data is structured, clean, and tagged effectively, making it easy for both AI agents and human analysts to query our own data for real-time insights.
Knowledge Retrieval: Build systems that allow LLMs to accurately access proprietary company data (documents, historical performance) without hallucinations.
Systems Architecture & Internal Tools: Oversee the development and maintenance of internal tools to guarantee consistency, functionality, ease of access, and collaborative use across all teams and personnel.
Custom Interfaces: Develop lightweight, user-friendly web applications (using tools like Streamlit, Retool, or React) that allow non-technical staff to utilize AI workflows.
Reliability: Monitor the health of automated workflows to ensure they run reliably and securely.