About Bambee
Most small businesses in America have no HR function at all. Bambee fixes that — every customer gets a dedicated HR Manager plus software that handles policies, handbooks, terminations, performance, and compliance. We're now building Bambee 2.0, where AI runs through the center of the product instead of sitting on top of it.
About the Role
We're hiring a Director of AI to own the AI function at Bambee — the models, the architecture, the roadmap, and the small team that builds it. This work is reviewed weekly by our executive team alongside the operating plan and capital strategy, and reported to the CEO's office every week.
This is a builder's role. You'll spend more time building than in meetings about building, working in person with product and engineering in our Los Angeles office five days a week.
What You'll Do
- Own the AI roadmap — what we build, in what order, and why — and defend those calls with evidence
- Design and ship the intelligence behind Bambee's HR guidance: systems that help small business owners handle real situations, like a termination, a policy question, or an audit, with speed and judgment
- Build an evaluation discipline: every model and agent gets measured for accuracy, safety, and usefulness before a customer sees it, and monitored after
- Set technical direction on model selection, training, fine-tuning, retrieval, and agent architecture, and change it when the evidence says to
- Hire and lead a small AI engineering team as the function grows; until then, be the strongest builder on it
- Work with HR Managers and service teams to turn their expertise into product intelligence
- Report progress weekly in writing to the executive team: what shipped, what moved, what's blocked, what you need
- Keep us honest on AI safety, privacy, and customer trust
Required Qualifications
- Experience shipping production AI/ML systems that real customers depend on — not prototypes or demos
- Strong knowledge of predictive models and machine learning architectures
- Deep, current fluency with LLMs: prompting, fine-tuning, retrieval, evaluation, and agentic systems
- Experience leading engineers, or clear readiness to
- Ability to explain a model decision to a CEO, a product manager, and a domain expert in the same meeting
- A bias for shipping — you'd rather put something real in front of users this month than something perfect next quarter
- Comfort defining your own scope and owning ambiguous problems
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in HR tech, legal tech, fintech, or another domain where being wrong has consequences
- Experience building AI products for small businesses or non-technical users
- Experience as an early AI hire (employee #1–5) at a company, having lived the zero-to-one build
Equal Opportunity
Bambee evaluates qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic.
Pay: $180,000.00 - $200,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Dental insurance
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
Application Question(s):
- How many years of experience do you have personally writing code, prompts, or model architecture for AI/ML systems yourself?
- Was the AI/ML system you personally built used in production by real paying customers?
- How many years have you held a Director, VP, Head-of, or CTO-level title with direct budget or team ownership?
- Do you have experience building AI or software for regulated industries (HR, legal, fintech, healthcare) or for small-business/non-technical end users?
Experience:
- Director, VP, or CTO-level title with team ownership: 2 years (Required)
Ability to Commute:
- Glendale, CA 91203 (Required)
Work Location: In person
