Director of AI Engineering, AI Labs
Designer Fund is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage tech companies using design to improve health, sustainability, or prosperity for people. It backs founding teams, particularly those with design backgrounds, across sectors like fintech, healthcare, climate tech, and developer tools.
About Designer Fund
Designer Fund is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in tech companies leveraging design to drive positive outcomes in health, sustainability, and financial prosperity. Its portfolio spans a wide range of sectors including financial infrastructure (Stripe), preventative health (Omada), collaborative tools (Notion), developer tools (Netlify), product management (Linear), payroll and benefits (Gusto), design tools (Framer), and healthcare infrastructure (Commure), among dozens of other companies across fintech, climate tech, healthcare, EdTech, and AI. The firm also runs 'Designer Founders,' a community and platform highlighting designers who have gone on to found and lead companies, reflecting its focus on backing design-driven founders and design-centric startups from early stages through growth and acquisition.
Skills
About the Role
You'll lead the AI Labs technical team at Via, with a mandate to move fast, experiment boldly, and build AI-powered products that can fundamentally change how Via and partner cities operate. This is a rare opportunity to be both a hands-on technical leader and a people leader, managing a small team of exceptional senior engineers while remaining deeply embedded in the work yourself. You'll have real autonomy, direct access to leadership, and the backing of a company already at scale - without the constraints that usually come with it. If you've built AI products end-to-end and you're energized by doing that in an entrepreneurial, fast-paced mode, with a blank canvas and a world-class team around you, this is the role for you.
Requirements
- 10+ years of hands-on experience building and shipping AI-powered products end-to-end, with deep expertise across the AI/ML stack including LLMs, predictive modelling, and production data infrastructure
- Experienced in leading senior engineering talent, setting a high bar and giving direct feedback
- Strong backend engineering skills, comfortable designing scalable APIs and working with distributed systems
- Energized by ambiguity and early-stage environments, able to create clarity for the team
- Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
- Comfortable with travel to collaborate on-site with partners and customers
Responsibilities
- Lead, develop, and inspire a small team of highly skilled AI engineers, setting technical direction and building a culture of ownership and experimentation
- Own the engineering execution of the AI Labs roadmap, ensuring the team ships production-grade AI products reliably
- Contribute directly to architecture decisions, backend systems, and code that powers AI-driven features at scale
- Work closely with customers in a forward-deployed manner to understand problems and iterate quickly on scalable agentic solutions
- Lead technical scoping workshops, directly interfacing with city leaders to solve local problems with agentic workflows
- Drive engineering across a varied roadmap spanning data consolidation, predictive modelling, real-time decision-making, and LLM-powered experiences
- Collaborate with product, data science, and operations teams to identify and prioritize the highest-impact AI opportunities
- Stay close to the frontier of AI development and bring new ideas, tools, and approaches into the team
Benefits
- Free medical plans
- 401K matching
- Catered lunch on Wednesdays