Director of Engineering - AI Agents

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

FurtherAI is building a domain-specific AI platform for the insurance industry, helping insurers, reinsurers, MGAs, and brokers automate complex workflows that traditionally require significant manual effort. Backed by top investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator, Nexus, South Park Commons, and Converge, FurtherAI has raised approximately $30M and supports customers writing more than $15B in premiums across all 50 US states. The company's AI Workspace automates workflows including submission intake, policy comparisons, underwriting audits, and other complex insurance operations. Rather than providing a generic AI assistant, FurtherAI builds deeply specialized AI systems that understand insurance-specific processes and workflows. The company is growing rapidly and operates with a highly entrepreneurial culture where engineering, product, and go-to-market teams work closely together. Everyone is expected to take ownership beyond their formal job description, work directly with customers, and move quickly from problem identification to production deployment. As Director of Engineering – AI Agents, you'll own and scale the company's entire AI engineering organization. You'll define the technical direction for production AI agents, build the engineering organization beneath you, and remain deeply involved in architecture and code while shaping the future of AI-powered insurance workflows. This is an opportunity to join a high-growth AI company at a critical stage and build an AI organization from the ground up.

Requirements

7+ years of software engineering experience
Significant experience building production AI/ML systems
Experience leading engineering teams or organizations
Experience building and scaling teams from an early-stage environment
Experience building production LLM-powered applications or agentic systems
Experience owning technical architecture for complex AI products
Experience with AI agents, multi-agent systems, or agent orchestration
Experience building systems that operate reliably in production
Experience working closely with product and business leadership
Experience hiring and developing high-performing engineering teams
Strong hands-on engineering background with the ability to remain technically involved
Experience operating in high-growth startups or highly entrepreneurial environments
Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous technical problems into scalable systems
Deep understanding of modern LLM architectures and production AI systems
Strong Python engineering experience
Experience designing multi-agent orchestration systems
Experience with model routing and LLM infrastructure
Experience building evaluation frameworks for AI agents
Experience with AI reliability, monitoring, and production evaluation
Experience with multimodal AI pipelines
Strong distributed systems and backend engineering fundamentals
Experience designing scalable AI infrastructure
Experience building long-running agentic workflows
Strong understanding of LLM inference and production deployment
Experience with model providers, APIs, or AI infrastructure platforms
Strong software architecture and system design capabilities
Experience building AI systems that interact with real customer workflows
Ability to evaluate technical tradeoffs across models, infrastructure, latency, cost, and reliability
Exceptional technical leadership
Strong engineering judgment
High ownership mentality
Excellent communication skills
Strong hiring and organizational leadership ability
Comfortable remaining hands-on technically
High execution velocity
Comfortable operating without a predefined playbook
Strong product intuition
Customer-obsessed mindset
Low-ego collaborative leadership style
Comfortable working directly with founders and executives
Ability to make decisions quickly in ambiguous environments
Strong entrepreneurial mentality
Ability to inspire and develop high-performing technical teams
Comfortable working in a high-intensity startup environment

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or related technical field preferred

Responsibilities

Own and scale FurtherAI's entire AI engineering organization
Build the AI organization into three core teams: AI Infrastructure, Agent Intelligence, and Agentic Products
Define the technical architecture and long-term strategy for production AI agents
Lead development of AI infrastructure focused on model routing, reliability, and production performance
Build agent intelligence systems including evaluation frameworks, shared tools, and multimodal pipelines
Lead development of customer-facing AI assistants and long-running agentic workflows
Design and implement multi-agent orchestration systems for complex insurance workflows
Establish reliable model routing and inference architectures across different LLM providers
Build evaluation systems that measure agent quality, reliability, accuracy, and production performance
Develop multimodal AI pipelines capable of processing complex insurance information
Ensure AI agents operate reliably in real customer environments involving high-value insurance workflows
Recruit, mentor, and retain a world-class AI engineering organization
Hire and develop engineering leaders who can eventually own individual AI teams
Establish engineering standards, architecture practices, and technical operating principles across the AI organization
Remain deeply technical and actively participate in system architecture, design, and code
Work closely with the founders and product leadership to shape company-wide technical direction
Partner directly with customers and internal teams to understand difficult AI use cases
Translate customer problems into scalable AI systems and product capabilities
Push the technical frontier of what AI agents can accomplish in insurance
Balance rapid experimentation with production reliability and engineering rigor
Build systems capable of handling increasingly complex, long-running, and multimodal workflows
Help define the technical roadmap as FurtherAI scales beyond its current product and customer base