Internal AI Lead

Zip•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Zip is the AI platform for enterprise procurement — built for humans and agents working together. By orchestrating procurement across teams, tools, and suppliers with the help of AI agents, companies can secure the resources they need to innovate faster than ever before. The world’s most influential enterprises trust Zip, including T-Mobile, OpenAI, AMD, Mars, Dollar Tree, and more. Together they’ve saved over $8 billion and processed over $500 billion in spend. Zip’s team includes product leaders from Apple, Airbnb, and Meta, as well as former procurement leaders from United Health, Sanofi, MGM Resorts, Discover, and NASA. Backed by Adams Street, Alkeon, BOND, CRV, DST, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator, Zip has raised $371 million, most recently at a $2.2 billion valuation and has been recognized by Forbes Fintech 50, Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies, Inc. Best in Business, and LinkedIn Top Startups. Your Role You are the hands-on builder, problem solver, and strategist at the center of Zip’s new Internal AI team. The Internal AI team operates in a hub-and-spoke model: we own a central roadmap of product and platform capabilities that accelerate AI adoption across every non-product engineering team at Zip, and we partner with those teams so their own roadmaps accelerate AI impact across Zip, safely. This role is the operating-model owner of that hub. You will define the central roadmap that our internal AI engineers build against, run the AI Champion & Leader network that extends our reach into every department, and own the training, enablement, and tooling that continues to accelerate Zip as an industry leader in AI. You lead by doing — prototyping solutions, pressure-testing ideas in production, and showing teams what’s possible before asking them to adopt it.

Requirements

7+ years leading cross-functional change or transformation programs at a high-growth software company. You’ve driven new ways of working across a whole org, not just a team.
AI-first and hands-on. Daily driver of Claude. You’ve built your own skills, agents, and workflows — and have strong opinions on where AI wins and where it fails. You prototype before you prescribe.
Technically deep. You read API docs, understand MCP, reason about data flows, and vibe-code working prototypes. You’re comfortable in AI tools and can build a proof-of-concept over a weekend.
Strategic and influential. You hold the 12-month view, partner with VPs to invest their teams’ time, and can tell leaders “not yet” with tact.
Problem solver who thrives in ambiguity. You’ve run hackathons, offsites, or enablement programs from scratch — and you love getting into the details to unblock people.

Responsibilities

Define and own the roadmap. Translate department needs, champion insights, and leadership priorities into a prioritized roadmap for the Internal AI Team across initiatives. Validate ideas by building quick prototypes before committing engineering time.
Run the AI Champion & Leader network and partner with every department head. Own the cadence across all 10 department champions and leaders — surfacing wins, unblocking champions, funneling feedback. Sit directly with each department lead to understand their roadmap, shape their quarterly AI goals, and make sure the Internal AI team is sequenced to accelerate them.
Build Zip’s AI skills framework. Define and operate the process, standards, and repository for how agents and skills are authored, reviewed, shared, and retired across Zip. Get your hands dirty building reference implementations and extending GTM’s early centralization work into a company-wide standard.
Co-own Internal AI team tooling. Partner with the internal AI engineers on the ownership, administration, and operation of the tools the Internal AI team runs on behalf of the company — Enterprise AI Assistants, Notion AI, n8n, the skills repository, and other platform capabilities. Evaluate and prototype new tooling to address missing capabilities.
Own training and enablement across the org. Build and run the strategy for continuous AI upskilling — foundations courses, department-specific deep dives, office hours, content and communication for internal channels, onboarding for new Zipsters, hackathons. Broad for the company, targeted where each department needs depth.
Ship solutions, not just strategy. Set the tempo — company cadences, communication strategy, regular company-wide AI experimentation time, AI surveys that track comfort and confidence. Own our internal hackathon, mini hackathons in teams, and create new ways to move AI forward internally. When a team is stuck, you jump in and build the first working version yourself.