Tech Director, AI Products

About the role

R/GA is a globally renowned design and innovation network with a history spanning over four decades. Known for pioneering innovations like the original Nike+ ecosystem and the launch of Beats by Dre, R/GA helps brands adapt and thrive in the tech-driven era. Now independent, R/GA is investing heavily in AI to lead the Intelligence Age.

About AI Products (AIP)

AI Products (AIP) is the team driving R/GA's future. Our mission is to transform R/GA from a service-as-labor model to a service-as-software one, creating reusable AI products through innovative engineering. AIP is a small, senior team focused on building with agents and delivering scalable solutions.

Responsibilities

• Hands-on Full-Stack Engineering: Ship production code across the stack — frontend, backend, AI/ML, and infrastructure.
• Agent-Driven Development: Lead how AIP builds with agents. Set the standards, patterns, and tooling that ensure agent-generated code is production-quality.
• Architecture & Platform: Define the reference architecture, runtime, and tooling underlying AIP's products, ensuring each is genuinely reusable across clients.
• Engineering Leadership: Lead the technical build of our first product bets. Set patterns, mentor the team, and raise the bar.
• Productization Discipline: Ensure every product ships as a working demo, a marketing deck, and a reusable codebase. Hold the line against one-off custom work.
• Cross-Network Partnership: Coordinate with R/GA's CTO and engineering teams to harvest patterns and ensure architectural coherence.
• Talent: Hire, develop, and retain a high-bar engineering team.
• Pitch Support: Act as the authoritative technical voice in the room during high-stakes pitches.
• Roadmap & Bet Selection: Partner with Paul and Nick to evaluate productization opportunities and decide what scales versus what retires.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years leading AI-powered products in production.
• Full-stack engineering capability: strong in at least three of the following — modern frontend (React/TypeScript), backend (Python/Node/Go), AI/ML systems and pipelines, or infrastructure. You are comfortable picking up tickets across the stack.
• Expertise in agent-driven development. You know when to drive an agent and when to write code yourself, as well as how to review and harden agent output before it ships.
• Deep fluency in generative AI: LLMs, agent frameworks, retrieval architectures, evaluation methods, and deployment patterns.
• Proven track record of shipping reusable software products (not just custom client builds).
• Founding-team or early-engineering-leader experience at a startup, studio, or product organization.
• Comfortable presenting to the C-suite and senior client technologists while keeping technical credibility intact.
• A strong bias for shipping. A tight v0 in two weeks beats a perfect roadmap in two months.

Bonus Points

• Prior experience at an agency, studio, or consulting firm — you understand pitch-driven rhythms.
• Open-source contributions or published technical writing on AI systems, agent design, or generative interfaces.
• A background in design tooling, brand systems, content infrastructure, or generative interfaces.
• Experience designing platform/SDK abstractions that other engineers happily adopt.

Benefits

Enjoy an independent mandate to invest in AI with direct executive sponsorship from the CEO and CTO. Have a direct line to the Head of AI Products and the Global CTO. Your work will show up in pitches, press, and awards.

Schedule

Flexible schedule to accommodate the needs of the role and the team.

Pay

The hiring range for this position is $200,000 to $240,000. Where an employee or prospective employee is paid within this range will depend on, among other factors, actual ranges for current/former employees in the subject position; budgetary considerations; tenure and standing with the company (applicable to current employees); as well as the employee's/applicant's applicable skills, pertinent experience, and qualifications.