Applied AI Lead

Care more about picking the right problem than about using the fanciest tool for it

Love the hunt: scanning a business, finding what's broken or underpowered, and putting a number on the prize

Get more energy from building and shipping than from analyzing and presenting

Dive deep to understand root causes when solving problems, and become a subject matter expert along the way

Aren't afraid to pick up new tools and skills, from Claude Code to custom ML pipelines, whatever the problem requires

Want to see your work change the numbers, and feel unsatisfied until it does

Thrive in ambiguity and don't need a playbook to figure out what to work on next

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. (ML experience is NOT required for this role; we used Claude Code to teach ourselves enough ML to build this.)

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

You'll own the map of AI opportunity across the business: identifying problems and opportunities, dissecting and sizing them, and deciding what gets built next.

The projects we work on are significant enough to alter the trajectory of the business. Recent builds have driven double digit improvements to company-wide KPIs, and the backlog holds many more with similar potential.

You'll carry each build from diagnosis through shipping, deployment, adoption, and iteration. A project is finished when the impact we set out for is visible, and you'll own that full arc.

Many of the problems in our backlog are ambitious enough that they could be standalone products. We'll provide the tools and resources you need to execute them end to end.

Reporting Structure: This role reports to Jonathan Shenkman.

Team Collaboration: You'll work day to day with our Applied AI team and partner with key stakeholders across every team at Owner, including BizOps, RevOps, Sales, Marketing, Growth, Product, Finance, and Recruiting.

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

A track record of finding the problems worth solving. You've looked at a messy business, figured out what actually matters, sized the prize, and picked the right thing to work on without anyone handing you a roadmap.

Root-cause instincts. You dig until you actually understand the problem instead of its symptoms. You rabbithole, but you also know when you've gone too deep.

Hands-on experience building with LLMs, integrating the models and APIs themselves: agents and assistants, structured output, evals, context engineering. You turn concepts into working code.

3+ years of experience in a 0-1 operations or 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, which matters more than ever given how easy it has become to build almost anything.

You treat shipping as the midpoint. You watch how a build performs in the real world, gather feedback, and iterate until the impact you set out for actually arrives.

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

Restaurant industry experience is a plus!

Communication from our team regarding job opportunities will only be made by an Owner team member with an @owner.com email address.

We do not conduct interviews over email or chat platforms, and we will never ask you to provide personal or financial information such as your mailing address, social security number, credit card numbers or banking information. If you believe you are being contacted by a scammer, please mark the communication as "phishing" or “spam” and do not respond.