Founding Head of AI (Paid in Equity)

Overview

We’re Aeone — a fast-moving startup building AI agents for marketing teams and creators. Our mission is to streamline content creation, distribution, and campaign management, so creative teams can focus on bold ideas instead of tedious workflows.At Aeone, you’ll tackle world-scale marketing and media problems and help shape the future of marketing technology — powered by cutting-edge AI. We’re looking for a founding leader who wants to push AI beyond the lab and change how the world's creates and consumes marketing content.

The Role

As Head of AI, you will own Aeone’s AI vision, strategy, and execution. This is a founding, hands-on leadership role where you’ll architect core AI systems, guide technical direction, and build the foundation of Aeone’s AI organization.

Examples of AI innitiatives you'd lead:

• AI Video Editing & Virality 

• AI Research Lab

• AI Social Listening 

• Text-to-Video / Photo Generation

This role blends technical depth, strategic leadership, and product ownership. You’ll define model approaches, guide architectural decisions, and ensure AI capabilities are tightly integrated into Aeone’s platform and user experience.

What You’ll Do

• Define and execute Aeone’s AI and ML strategy, roadmap, and long-term vision

• Architect, build, and deploy state-of-the-art generative and multimodal models

• Lead development of AI agents for video understanding, segmentation, summarization, and generation

• Oversee training and fine-tuning of diffusion models, transformers, and multimodal architectures

• Design virality and engagement prediction systems using platform-specific data

• Optimize inference pipelines for real-time and near-real-time performance

• Establish best practices for ML infrastructure, experimentation, evaluation, and deployment

• Collaborate closely with product, design, and engineering to ensure AI outputs are intuitive and impactful

• Build and mentor the AI/ML team as the company scales

• Shape Aeone’s AI research culture, including opportunities for publication when aligned with company goals

What We’re Looking For

• Master’s degree with 5+ years of experience in machine learning / AI, or 

  Bachelor’s degree with 7+ years of experience, or

  PhD/Postdoc with published AI/ML research

• Deep expertise in machine learning engineering and applied AI systems

• Strong hands-on experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow

• Proven leadership in building and deploying generative models (Diffusion, GANs, Transformers) and/or video understanding systems

• Strong understanding of multimodal learning, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning strategies

• Experience taking AI models from research to production

• Ability to operate in a fast-paced, high-ownership startup environment

• Comfortable balancing technical depth with product and business priorities

Bonus

• Prior experience with social media content analysis, virality modeling, or engagement prediction

• PhD in Computer Science or related field with a focus on AI/ML

• Experience building AI teams from the ground up

Why You’ll Love This Role

• Founding-level impact — define the AI foundation and direction of the company

• Full ownership of AI research, development, and long-term strategy

• Direct influence on real-world creative tools used by marketers, brands, and creators

• Work on-site in Seattle, WA with a small, high-caliber team that moves fast

• Opportunity to publish and speak about applied AI when aligned with company goals

• Opportunity to scale a product from 0 → millions of users

Compensation (pre-Seed round)

• Option 1 – Part-Time (Weekend Commitment): compensation is ~1%–2% equity, for 16-20 hours on the weekend.

• Option 2 – Full-Time (Full-time Commitment): compensation is ~5%–6% equity