Founding Applied AI Engineer

About Okara

Okara is a San Francisco-based startup building an agentic AI CMO. The product connects to a company's website, identifies its ideal customer profile, competitors, and differentiation, and deploys agents across Reddit, LinkedIn, X, SEO, generative engine optimization (GEO), and article writing. At the intake meeting, founder Fatima described Okara as eight months old, pre-raise, profitable, and growing fast.

About the Role

You'll be Okara's first senior AI hire, owning the quality and intelligence of our multi-channel marketing agents end to end. Working directly with the founder, you'll shape agent architecture, evaluation systems, and learning loops while building out the AI team from the ground up. This role is critical to scaling the reliability and effectiveness of agents operating across SEO, content, social, and search channels.

What You'll Do

• Improve agent output and content quality across Reddit, LinkedIn, X, and article writing, with evaluation systems that make quality measurable.
• Improve SEO and generative engine optimization (GEO) performance.
• Design feedback loops that enable agents to learn from real-world results and performance signals at scale.
• Improve AI infrastructure, agent architecture, model strategy, and the data pipelines that power them.
• Hire and lead the AI team as the organization grows.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years building production ML or AI systems, with recent hands-on work shipping LLM products or agents.
• Proven experience designing evals and learning from outcome signals at scale in domains like search, ranking, or recommendations.
• Strong TypeScript (Next.js) and Python proficiency for data analysis, evals, and model work; you ship end to end.
• Sharp judgment about output quality and the ability to make it measurable and actionable.
• Ownership experience in a startup or small team environment.
• Search or ranking experience, particularly with Google or AI answer engines.
• Background from a leading AI lab or top research program.
• Marketing or go-to-market experience is a plus. Candidates with recommendation systems, algorithms, or reinforcement learning experience are also relevant; a marketing background is not required.

Location and Compensation

• San Francisco, CA (on-site).
• Target annual compensation: $180,000-$230,000 USD