Applied AI Lead

Madhive is the leading independent and fully customizable operating system built to help local media professionals build profitable, differentiated, and efficient businesses. Madhive empowers sales teams to extend their reach into streaming and connects local advertisers with the communities they serve. Madhive’s platform provides the unique ability to reach local audiences at national scale, with premium supply partnerships and end-to-end tools for planning, targeting, and measuring full-funnel campaign outcomes. Powering campaigns for over 30,000 small and medium businesses per day, Madhive is driving the evolution of local media.

Applied AI Lead

Reporting to the Chief Innovation Officer, the Applied AI Lead is the building muscle of Madhive's applied adtech innovation factory — turning identified needs into production-quality software at high velocity. This is a senior, startup-style role designed to transform identified needs into functional, production-quality software. As a fungible builder, you will surge across mandates, pairing with leadership to take innovative concepts from initial idea to load-bearing V1 releases. This role ensures the Office remains a dedicated building function rather than a strictly advisory one.

This is a hybrid role, working 3 days a week at Madhive HQ in the Financial District of New York City.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead zero-to-one builds, shipping production-quality prototypes in days rather than quarters.

• Develop reusable components and architectural patterns that can be leveraged by other leads and receiving teams.

• Maintain fungibility across various innovation mandates, addressing the highest weekly priorities with agility.

• Ship each V1 to production -- including load-bearing, and revenue-generating AI architecture then hand it off as a new innovation for the next team to build around.

Qualifications & Experience

• Senior Builder Profile: 10+ years of experience or a founding/early-engineer background with a proven track record of shipping end-to-end software solo or with small teams.

• Zero-to-One Expertise: Demonstrated ability to take projects from a blank page to live users, with the ability to articulate the full loop of discovery, iteration, and customer metric movement (activation, retention, etc.).

• Tool Fluency: Broad, full-stack, and AI-native capabilities. Proficient in standing up production prototypes using agentic coding tools, AI coding agents, and eval/observability frameworks.

• Operational Style: High technical bar combined with grit in ambiguity. Low-ego and collaborative, with a focus on making surrounding teams better without creating territorial boundaries.

• Fresh Perspective: We prioritize innovators from outside the ad-tech category to bring fresh perspectives; prior ad-tech experience is specifically not required.

How Success is Measured

Key Metric — Expansion (the Applied Adtech Innovation Factory): The Office runs as Madhive's forward-deployed applied innovation factory, and success is the new surface area it opens. We measure expansion across:

• Clients: new clients served and accounts deepened on the back of shipped V1s.

• Verticals: new verticals and use cases the factory opens up.

• Features: new revenue-generating features and load-bearing AI architecture put into production, then handed off seamlessly as platforms the next team builds around.

• Value per unit time — ours and clients': how fast the factory manufactures and hands off production-quality V1s (innovation output per builder, per cycle), and the revenue, new capability, and time-to-value those builds unlock for clients.

Location / Work Model

Hybrid, NYC – 3 days in office, with travel to other Madhive locations as needed.

The approximate compensation range for this position is $200,000-$225,000. The actual offer, reflecting the total compensation package and benefits, will be determined by a number of factors, including the applicant's experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity among our team.

#LI-Hybrid

We are Madhive

Madhive is a dynamic, diverse, innovative, and friendly place to work. We embrace our differences and believe they fuel our creativity. We come from varied backgrounds and think that’s important. Whether it’s taking ideas from previous lives and applying them in different ways or creating something completely new, we are all trail-blazing team players who think big and want to make an impact.

We are committed to cultivating a culture of inclusion and collaboration. We welcome diversity in education, culture, opinions, race, ethnicity, gender identity, veteran status, religion, disability, sexual orientation, and beliefs.

Please be advised that we will NOT be using third-party recruiting agencies for this search.