Head of Applied AI

San Francisco
Full-time
$350K - $500K
Posted Oct 30, 2026

Apply on employer site

Skills

Leadership

Job description

Engineering · Full-time · On-site, San Francisco · Salary: $350K - $500K + meaningful ownership of equity

ABOUT ERAGON

Eragon is an Applied AI lab building an AI platform that powers proactive agents for sovereign enterprises. We're working on memory, model routing, continual learning, and product experience that make agents useful, reliable, and governable in real-world settings.

We've raised more than $26 million in seed funding from investors including Khosla Ventures, a16z, Soma Capital, and Long Journey Ventures. We work with customers including Deel, Slash, Prodware, and Corgi to power their AI-native workflows.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Eragon is building AI agents that do real work inside companies. That takes more than impressive features: the product has to be coherent, dependable, and useful when it meets the complexity of a customer's actual systems and workflows.

As Head of Applied AI, you'll lead engineering through that challenge. You'll lead the engineering team, own the product's architecture and research direction, represent engineering to customers, and write and ship production code yourself.

The people who do well here have been close to the frontier of agents and post-training, have built a company's core systems from the early days, and want to lead from inside the work.

IDEALLY, YOU'D HAVE

Experience from one of these areas:

1. Early engineers at an AI startup backed by leading investors, who helped build its agent platform from the ground up

2. Engineers or researchers who've worked on model post-training—RL, fine-tuning, evals—at a leading AI company and want to apply it to agents in production

3. Founding or lead engineers who've taken an agent product from first customers to scale and grown the team along the way

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL

•Set the Technical Direction: Make the architecture understandable and durable, and decide what belongs in the shared platform, what stays customer-specific, and where to invest or simplify

•Set the Research Agenda: Choose the bets, in post-training, model routing, and self-improving agents, that will make Eragon meaningfully better, and know when to stop exploring and ship

•Lead the Team: Hire excellent people, develop the engineers already here, and set a high bar for technical judgment

•Build Alongside the Team: Write production code and take on the hardest problems directly; this is not a management-only role

•Be the Face of Engineering: Join important customer conversations, explain our decisions clearly, and own the resolution when hard engineering issues come up

•Turn Direction into Delivery: Make trade-offs across reliability, quality, speed, and customer needs so architectural decisions show up in a better product, not just in documents

REQUIREMENTS

Must haves

•Background: One of the early engineers at a fast-growing startup, working on agents or harness engineering

•Agents in Production: Has worked through the hard parts of making agents useful in production—reliability, evaluation, tool use, context, and what happens when an agent gets something wrong

•Architecture: Has shaped a product's architecture as it grew, with clear calls on what to build into the platform

•Leadership: Has led engineers through hiring, technical direction, honest feedback, and a high bar for shipping

•Hands-On: Still writes and ships production code

•Customer Trust: Earns a customer's trust in a difficult technical conversation and owns resolving the underlying problem

Nice to haves

•Hands-on post-training experience: RL, fine-tuning, reward modeling, or eval design

•Experience building systems that learn from agent trajectories or user feedback

•Experience growing an engineering team through a period of rapid scale

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Equal Opportunity: Eragon is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome people of all backgrounds and identities and want everyone here to do their best work as themselves.

Accommodations: If you need support or a reasonable accommodation during the application process, let us know and we'll be glad to help.