Head of Applied AI

What You Will Own

• Production AI Systems. Design, build, and ship LLM-powered features end-to-end: document understanding, structured data extraction from payroll and compliance inputs, multi-step reasoning workflows, and intelligent automation across the Niural platform.
  • You write and review code.
  • You deploy to production.
  • You own the outcome.
• Evaluation & Reliability. Construct rigorous evaluation frameworks with ground-truth datasets, regression tracking, and clear production-readiness criteria.
  • Define what “good” means, measure it, and hold the bar.
• AI Infrastructure. Build and own the core stack: RAG pipelines, vector stores, embedding systems, fine-tuning workflows, model serving, and observability tooling.
  • Make principled build-vs-integrate decisions based on accuracy, cost, latency, and data privacy.
• Responsible AI in Practice. Implement hallucination controls, confidence scoring, human-in-the-loop review flows, and audit trails for model-driven decisions.
  • This is a domain where responsible AI isn’t a slide deck, it’s an engineering requirement with regulatory consequences.
• Cross-Functional Translation. Work with product and engineering to translate business requirements into concrete model specifications, data requirements, and acceptance criteria.
  • Bridge the gap between “we need AI to do X” and a shipped, measurable feature.
• Team & Engineering Culture. Set the engineering foundations, code standards, review processes, documentation practices, that will support a growing AI team.
  • You’ll be the first dedicated AI hire; the team grows around the standard you set.

What We’re Looking For

• 6+ years hands-on in ML or AI engineering, with at least 2 years building and shipping production LLM systems, not notebooks, not prototypes, production.
• Strong Python engineering skills. You write production-quality code that other engineers can review, test, and extend.
• Solid command of ML infrastructure: model serving, vector databases, embedding pipelines, and monitoring in production environments.
• Experience working with structured and unstructured data in a high-accuracy, low-tolerance-for-error context. Fintech, HR tech, legal tech, or healthcare strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous business requirements into concrete technical approaches and ship them cross-functionally.
• Comfortable with a high degree of ownership in an early-stage environment where the right process needs to be created, not followed.

Bonus Points

• Experience with agentic systems and multi-agent orchestration in production- LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI or similar (not just toy examples).
• Background in NLP applied to legal, financial, or regulatory document processing, especially multilingual.
• Prior experience as an early AI hire at a Series A - C company where you built the function from scratch.

What We’re Not Looking For

• You prefer managing engineers to writing code. This role is at least 70% hands-on for the first 12–18 months.
• You want to do pure research. We selectively incorporate techniques that are genuinely relevant; we don’t publish papers.
• You need established processes and clear handoffs. At this stage, you’ll often be defining the process, not inheriting it.
• You’re uncomfortable with regulated, high-stakes domains where shipping fast and shipping correctly are both non-negotiable.

What Niural Offers

• Competitive base + significant equity at a high-growth, venture-backed company approaching Series B.
• Onsite at Niural’s New York headquarters, working directly with a focused, technical team.
• Direct access to the CEO and CTO. Your technical decisions will have immediate, visible product impact.
• Well-resourced AI infrastructure budget and access to frontier model APIs from day one.
• A domain with genuine complexity, real data, and problems that have not been solved yet, across 150+ countries.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage. Learning and development budget.

About the Role

The Short Version Niural is the AI-native platform that unifies payroll, compliance, HR, and financial operations across 150+ countries. Our AI agent layer, EMMA, doesn’t sit on top of the product, it is the product. We process high-stakes, multi-jurisdictional payroll and compliance data where a single error can mean regulatory penalties, missed paychecks, or broken trust. We’re hiring a Head of Applied AI to own the entire AI engineering function. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who ships production systems, not someone who manages from a distance. You will design, build, and iterate on the AI systems that make Niural’s platform intelligent, and you will set the engineering standard for the team that grows around you.