Applied AI Lead (Applied AI Operator)

Applied AI Lead

Location

Remote - United States; Remote - Canada

Employment Type

Full time

Department

G&A

About Owner

Owner is the AI-native system local business owners use to succeed, starting with restaurants.

We're building the system that replaces the many tools owners use to run their business.

It powers everything from the restaurant's website, online ordering, CRM, POS, and more.

Product philosophy

Most small business software makes owners do the work to get what they want: sales growth and profit growth. Owner does the work for them agentically.

Our system drives demand, converts it, and helps operators run their business day to day. As it improves, the business improves with it.

Using Owner should feel like having a team of great operators, engineers, and marketers working for you.

Our vision

We're starting by helping independent restaurants succeed online.

But it's not just restaurants that need our help. Most local businesses are struggling with these same problems. Huge technology corporations are taking their customers, bleeding their profits, and making it hard for them to survive.

Once we nail the solution for restaurants – we'll scale it into every other local business type.

Our traction

Since 2020, we've generated tens of millions in revenue and processed over a billion dollars of online orders. 1 in 5 Americans have used an Owner.com website.

More importantly, we've helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees.

Why we're looking for you

We are scaling up Owner's Applied AI organization. This is a fast-paced, high-standards team, working on the most interesting, high-ROI opportunities we can identify across the business. As an Applied AI Lead, you'll be responsible for end-to-end execution and cross-functional leadership of AI-powered/enabled builds. The role is intended to be a marriage of AI technical development ability and 0-1 business savvy.

What we've built so far

• LLM-powered binary classifier for restaurant concept fit with Owner's product. Ran on over 300k establishments in the US.

• Hyperpersonalized outbound email engine, sending around 5k unique emails daily with a best-in-class reply rate.

• Automated pre-call research tool, eliminating the manual work that sales reps previously had to complete before every dial. Increased dial volume by almost double.

• Gradient Boosted Tree for predicting call pickup rate. Trained on dozens of features across tens of thousands of pieces of data, resulting in up to a ~2.3x increased pickup rate for top-identified leads. (Note: ML experience NOT required for this role, we just used CC to teach us enough ML to build this)

• Intelligent routing (iRouting) system incorporating our new pickup rate prediction score to optimize lead distribution on a daily basis.

The impact you will have

• The projects we work on are significant and impactful enough to fundamentally alter the trajectory of the business (i.e. regular driving of double digit improvements to company-wide KPIs).

• Our goal for Applied AI is to firmly establish ourselves as a best-in-industry Applied AI team.

• There exists a massive backlog of AI-solvable problems from every team at Owner. Many of these are ambitious enough that they could be standalone products.

Who you'll work with

• This role reports to our Applied AI Manager, YG Hong

• You will partner with key stakeholders across every team at Owner, including BizOps, RevOps, Sales, Marketing, Growth, Product, Finance, Recruiting, and more.

• Applied AI focuses exclusively on projects with the highest impact and ROI, which means regular exposure to senior and executive leadership.

What we're looking for

• 2+ years of experience building with LLMs - not just enabled by AI coding tools, but functionality integrating the models / APIs themselves. Agents/assistants, structured output, evals, context engineering, etc.

• You chase new ideas, your X feed is AI-pilled, and you turn concepts into actual working code.

• A history of building for fun, not just for work. The weirder, nicher, and more complex your list of side projects, the better.

• 3+ years of experience in a 0-1 operations / startup role - we treat every build as a 0-1 problem to solve from scratch.

• You move fast, work scrappy, and thrive in the chaos of an early-stage startup environment, especially when things are ambiguous and timelines are tight.

• Comfortable taking ambiguity and turning it into a ruthlessly-prioritized roadmap; you don't need a playbook to figure out what to work on next.

• You dig into root causes until you actually understand the problem, not just the symptoms.

• Strong communicator who can break down complex concepts for teammates, both human and AI.

• Restaurant industry experience is a plus!

Pay and benefits

• The estimated base salary range for this role is $140,000 to $175,000 for US-based roles, plus a generous equity pre-IPO equity package.

• Other benefits include comprehensive health coverage, work from anywhere (100% remote workplace), unlimited PTO.