Director of Engineering and AI

About Us 

We are a core team of designers, developers, cooks, and product innovators brought together by the many wonderful reasons to cook at home. Driven by our shared passion, we leverage transformative AI technology to make home cooking accessible for everyone, with the vision to support healthier, sustainable nutrition for present and future generations. Our first product is an AI Cooking Partner that improves your cooking experience and helps you preserve your recipes forever — in digital and in print.

Vinst was founded by the team behind Nanit, a top smart baby monitor company and a pioneer in applying AI and computer vision in consumer brands. Today we are building our organization as a learning system optimized for the AI era, where domain experts and engineers collaborate to solve complex real-world problems using AI-driven workflows and tools. We are still early enough that every strong hire shapes the company — and we’re looking for a Director of AI Engineering to lead the next phase of our AI platform and engineering team.

Before reading further, we highly recommend reading this article to learn on how we work as a team: 

https://tinyurl.com/yh43b3ss

What You’ll Do

As Director of Engineering & AI, reporting directly to the CEO, you will lead the development of Vinst’s AI platform and help shape how AI becomes the foundation of our product and internal workflows. This role requires both deep technical leadership and the intellectual ability to frame real-world problems as learning systems. 

AI Platform & Product Engineering

• Architect and lead the development of scalable AI-powered backend systems
• Design production-grade AI agent workflows integrated into real product experiences
• Define architectures for distributed agents, state persistence, and tool integrations
• Translate real-world product challenges into learning problems with measurable outcomes
• Ensure reliability, security, and observability of AI systems in production
• Drive the evolution of the AI infrastructure powering the Vinst platform

Organizational AI Systems

• Lead the development of internal AI tools that empower teams across the company to build solutions from company data
• Ensure strong governance and security for company data while enabling efficient AI-assisted workflows
• Help structure the data architecture and feedback loops that allow the company to continuously learn from its operations

Technical Leadership

• Build and lead a high-caliber engineering team with AI
• Define engineering standards, architecture principles, and AI development practices
• Work closely with CEO, CTO and stakeholders on company and AI strategy
• Mentor engineers and cultivate a collaborative engineering culture

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with product, design, marketing, and operations teams
• Help define the learning assumptions for problems solved across the organization
• Translate business and product questions into data workflows, models, and evaluation frameworks
• Ensure that AI solutions optimize the entire system outcome — not just isolated components

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for someone who combines strong engineering capability and business institution, with a deep intellectual curiosity about learning systems and complex problem solving across the organization

Key Traits

• Systems thinker — able to understand how different parts of a product, organization, and data ecosystem interact
• Learning-problem mindset — naturally frames real-world challenges as learning problems with clear assumptions, feedback loops, and evaluation criteria
• Strong business intuition — understands how AI systems ultimately impact the company’s business model, user value, and long-term outcomes
• Collaborative communicator — capable of explaining complex concepts clearly across technical and non-technical teams
• Service-oriented engineering mindset — motivated by enabling colleagues across the organization to build better solutions

Technical Background

• 7–10+ years of backend engineering experience
• Experience building and deploying scalable production systems
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and modern cloud infrastructure
• Full-stack capability is a strong advantage

AI / Machine Learning Background

• Designing AI-powered product systems using modern LLM and agent frameworks
• Distributed agent orchestration and asynchronous workflows
• Model evaluation and system-level performance optimization

Technology Stack (Strong Advantage)

• TypeScript / Node.js
• Cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred)
• Modern AI frameworks and LLM tooling
• Experience shipping AI-powered consumer products

We'd be thrilled if you bring experience in these areas:

• Background or familiarity with statistical learning theory and complexity in ML systems.
• Defining learning objectives/loss functions aligned with product goals.
• Designing data pipelines/reinforcement learning loops for system improvement.

Why Join Us

• Be part of a purpose-driven company building an everyday consumer brand
• Join the core team of an ambitious company at the right stage
• Work directly with founders who have built and scaled a global category leader
• Shape the AI foundation of a company designed for the AI era
• Small team, massive influence
• Competitive compensation with a meaningful equity

If you want to build something enduring with a team that knows how to win — we’d love to talk.