AI Lead (hands-on)

Job Title: AI Lead (hands-on)

Reports To: Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Location: Ramat Gan (near the train station)

Employment Type: Full-time

About the Company

ShopX is redefining the future of brick-and-mortar retail. We build immersive, AI-powered shopping experiences that help retailers overcome today’s challenges and become customer-focused enterprises. Our technology brings together intelligent AI and dynamic digital environments to create intuitive, personalized, and engaging experiences that feel natural and human. As physical retail evolves and shoppers expect more connection, convenience, and excitement, ShopX bridges the gap, bringing a new era of experiential, automated, data-driven retail to life. We are growing quickly, working with leading retailers, and building a strong team to shape the future of real-world shopping. Join us and help create what comes next in AI retail.

Your Mission

You will architect and lead the intelligence behind ShopX's next-generation retail platform, powering hyper-realistic AI avatars, real-time recommendation engines, and immersive in-store experiences inside the Qube, our AI-driven shopping room. Your mission is to build natural, intelligent, and emotionally aware retail AI that understands shoppers, responds in real time, guides decisions, and never misses a sale or a moment to delight. You will shape the way humans interact with physical commerce through conversation, vision, and intelligence.

What You'll Do

• Lead architecture and development of ShopX’s conversational AI, real-time recommendation engine, and avatar intelligence
• Build multi-modal AI: speech, vision, text, and behavior orchestration across physical stores
• Design real-time retrieval and recommendation systems that adapt to shopper profiles and preferences, store inventory, context, and scene changes
• Experiment with top LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, etc.) and select the optimal foundation for our use cases
• Develop advanced prompt strategies, context retrieval systems, and RAG pipelines for immersive shopping experiences
• Build evaluation systems for behavior consistency, tone, speed, accuracy, conversion uplift, and guardrails
• Drive the speech-to-speech pipeline (ASR + LLM + TTS) for fluid, natural avatar-customer conversations
• Ensure high performance and ultra-low latency for real-time in-store AI interactions
• Collaborate closely with business, product, UX, and engineering teams to define the language, personality, and intelligence of ShopX agents
• Balance accuracy, cost-efficiency, scalability, and user delight as we scale deployments globally

What We’re Looking For

• 4+ years in Applied AI / ML, with proven production experience
• Deep familiarity with LLMs, RAG, vector databases, and real-time inference
• Strong engineering skills (Python and/or TypeScript)
• Experience with frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar toolkits
• Understanding of voice AI (ASR, TTS) and multimodal models is a strong plus
• Ability to translate business goals into intelligent, behavior-driven systems that drive sales and user trust
• Creativity, curiosity, and a “build from zero” mindset
• Strong ownership — you’re motivated by impact, speed, and quality

Nice to Have

• Experience in retail tech, recommendation systems, or e-commerce personalization
• Fine-tuning / embedding pipelines / RAG optimization
• Experience with voice agents or VLMs
• Knowledge of MLOps or real-time systems at scale
• Familiarity with robotics / IoT / physical automation environments (bonus)
• Why This Role Is Different
• You're not building another chatbot, you’re building the mind of the world’s first fully immersive AI retail store
• Immediate impact on flagship stores in Israel and the US
• Defining a new category where commerce meets AI, creativity, behavior design, and real-world physics

Why Join Us

• Build the future of commerce by shaping the world’s first agent-driven, immersive AI retail platform
• Work side-by-side with the CTO and a high-velocity founding team solving complex, real-world engineering challenges
• Innovate at the edge of technology across AI agents, real-time 3D environments, retail automation, and scalable cloud systems
• Make a visible impact in a product-driven environment where your decisions directly influence the product, architecture, and customer experience
• Grow with us as we scale globally, with clear opportunities for leadership, ownership, and personal development
• Competitive compensation package and a culture designed for high performance, creativity, and getting things built