Applied AI Lead

Applied AI Lead

Remote - United States or Canada

FullTime / Business Operations, Analytics & Applied AI

About Owner

Owner is the AI-native system local business owners use to succeed, starting with restaurants. We're building the system that replaces the many tools owners use to run their business. It powers everything from the restaurant's website, online ordering, CRM, POS, and more.

Product Philosophy

Most small business software makes owners do the work to get what they want: sales growth and profit growth. Owner does the work for them agentically. Our system drives demand, converts it, and helps operators run their business day to day. As it improves, the business improves with it. Using Owner should feel like having a team of great operators, engineers, and marketers working for you.

Our Vision

We're starting by helping independent restaurants succeed online. But it's not just restaurants that need our help. Most local businesses are struggling with these same problems. Huge technology corporations are taking their customers, bleeding their profits, and making it hard for them to survive. Once we nail the solution for restaurants – we'll scale it into every other local business type. In the future we envision, tens of millions of local business owners will use our technology to succeed in the digital age.

Our Traction

Since 2020, we've generated tens of millions in revenue and processed over a billion dollars of online orders. 1 in 5 Americans have used an Owner.com website. More importantly, we've helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees.

Our Team

Our team is now in the low hundreds. We've got top talent from the most successful companies in SMB software, including: Shopify, HubSpot, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Rappi, Faire and Stripe. We'll be scaling even faster in 2026 to keep pace with our customer growth.

Where We Work

Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto. For a few of our roles we prioritize in-person collaboration at one of our office locations. Most of our teammates are distributed throughout the globe. Please review the role description and discuss with your recruiter for more details on location!

Why We Are Looking For You

We are scaling Owner's Applied AI organization. This is a fast-paced team that works on the most valuable opportunities we can find anywhere in the business. As an Applied AI Lead, you'll be responsible for finding those opportunities in the first place: looking across everything happening at Owner, understanding where AI can have the most impact, and sizing the potential before a single line of code gets written. Then you'll build, ship, and iterate on the solution until the impact shows up.

Some of these opportunities create efficiency by cutting out manual work that no longer needs to be manual. Others create better outcomes entirely: processes that now perform far beyond what they used to, and things we always wanted to do that only became practical with AI. You'll chase both, and you'll be the one deciding which come first.

This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada.

You Should Definitely Apply If You…

• 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

What We've Built So Far

• 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.

The Impact You Will Have

• 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.

Who You'll Work With

• 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.

What We're Looking For

• 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!

Pay and Benefits

The estimated base salary range for this role is $140,000 - $180,000 USD, plus a generous pre-IPO equity package

Other benefits include comprehensive health coverage, remote-first workplace, unlimited PTO - plus extra fun perks!

Notice - Employment Scams

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