Director of Technology and AI

Fireclay Tile • Davis, CA

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

Fireclay is seeking a Director of Technology and AI to own the AI rollout across the entire company, from the factory floor to marketing to sales. This role involves leading a team of developers, hands-on engineering leadership, and applied-AI work to create business value. The company envisions a future where every knowledge worker uses AI daily, integrated into their workflows. Fireclay Tile has a history of leveraging technology, including running production AI skills, agents, and internal applications. The Director will define and manage the enterprise architecture, security, governance, and process controls for scaling AI safely, including model access, permissions, review processes, auditing, and decision-making for AI investments. This is a hands-on role requiring deep involvement in problem-solving, solution building, coaching, and maintaining high standards for security, quality, and impact.

Requirements

• You are a builder. You have personally written and shipped production code, and you still want to.
• You use AI coding tools every day and can take an application from idea to production in days.
• You thrive at startup speed. You are energized by autonomy, comfortable with ambiguity, and bias toward shipping and learning.
• You have deep experience with modern AI application development: agents, MCP and tool use, automations, model selection, evaluation, retrieval, prompt and workflow design, and observability.
• You have designed enterprise architecture, security, and governance for AI or data systems. You know how to give teams powerful tools while controlling access, protecting data, and keeping humans in the loop where it matters.
• You have hands-on experience across a stack like ours: Salesforce, Google Cloud, Shopify, and a cloud data warehouse such as Snowflake. You care more about how systems connect than about any single platform.
• You are a strong mentor to junior developers. You have grown engineers early in their careers through code review, pairing, clear standards, and stretch assignments. You teach them to use AI well, to understand the business behind the ticket, and to own their work end to end. Your team gets better because you lead it.
• You can lead developers while staying close enough to the work to make good technical and product decisions.
• You bring conviction and humility: strong standards, direct communication, curiosity, and a willingness to change your mind when the evidence changes.

Nice To Haves

• Ship something small and useful within the first 30 days.
• Present an AI rollout plan for every team, an enterprise AI architecture and governance framework, a capability assessment, and a prioritized 12-month plan within the first 60 days.
• Select two or three high-value use cases with clear owners, baselines, ROI hypotheses, and delivery plans within the first 60 days.
• Ship at least one secure, measurable production workflow or application within the first 90 days.
• Put in place an AI investment scorecard, a teammate enablement rhythm, a mentoring plan for each developer, and the technical standards required to scale responsibly within the first 90 days.
• Every team is using AI daily in its core work, backed by governed, secure systems within the first year.
• Measurable cost savings, productivity gains, better decisions, faster developer throughput, or new revenue within the first year.
• Developers have grown noticeably under your leadership within the first year.
• Fireclay has a clear, shared architecture for an AI-first future within the first year.
• Every meaningful investment should show a clear return or a credible, measurable path to one.

Responsibilities

• Own the AI rollout across every Fireclay team, from production and supply chain to customer service, marketing, sales, and finance.
• Partner with the VP of Technology and the CEO to define the next vision of Fireclay's technology, built on AI.
• Design and run the enterprise architecture for AI: how agents, skills, and applications connect to Salesforce, Google Cloud, Shopify, and Snowflake, and how data flows between them.
• Own AI security, governance, and process control: access and permissions, data privacy, human review, audit trails, observability, and clear ownership for every production workflow.
• Lead, mentor, and grow Fireclay's development team, and raise the bar for how we build.
• Learn Fireclay deeply, from customer journey and order flow through manufacturing, fulfillment, installation, and support, and find the real points of friction, delay, rework, and opportunity.
• Build and ship AI-enabled workflows and applications quickly, often in days, that improve productivity, decision quality, customer experience, revenue, or cost.
• Identify and pursue customer-facing AI opportunities that make it easier to discover, design, purchase, receive, and install Fireclay products.
• Run a disciplined intake and prioritization process. Every meaningful AI investment should have a defined problem, baseline, owner, cost, expected value, success metric, security review, and scale-or-stop decision.
• Make the right build-versus-buy decisions. Use external tools, partners, and emerging models where they create leverage, without creating a fragile or ungoverned stack.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision
• 4% 401(k) match
• PTO (non-exempt) or FTO (exempt)
• Sick time
• Other perks
• Total compensation package may also include other elements, stock options, and discretionary bonus.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed