Models Czar [Remote]

About Us

Venice is the world’s leading consumer AI company built on principles of privacy, free speech, and user sovereignty. 

We’re building the Port City of AI, in which millions of individuals, third party apps, and AI agents gather, interact, and access sophisticated AI resources on a private and permissive foundation.  Our mission is to make artificial intelligence approachable and useful in everyday work—bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and practical, real-world impact.

We’re a fast-moving startup where every team member is expected to make a clear impact. Our culture is rooted in curiosity, ownership, ethical principle, philosophy, and collaboration—whether we’re designing better AI workflows, supporting our growing community, or shaping the future of human-AI interaction.

Joining Venice AI means joining a team of unorthodox builders who believe in moving quickly, delivering a beautiful mass-market and highly useful consumer product that doesn’t spy on people or censor their ideas and questions., and maintaining an edge in the rapidly evolving world of agentic machine intelligence. If you’re energized by big ideas, entrepreneurial spirit, individual empowerment, and the opportunity to help shape a fast-growing company in the world’s hottest industry from the ground up, please reach out.you’ll feel right at home here.

Why We’re Hiring

Our models aren't features — they're the core product. Today, decisions about portfolio composition, inference performance, model configuration, and lifecycle management are distributed across teams with no single accountable owner.

We're hiring a Models Czar to be that single owner of the model portfolio across all of Venice's products: selection, reliability, configuration, and lifecycle management. This is not an ML research role; Venice doesn’t train models. You will treat models as SKUs: making strategic calls about what to offer, how to position each one, and how to deliver the best experience across every Venice product.

Your stakeholders are Venice's external-facing products, and you are their central point of contact for a robust and reliable model lineup. You'll stay on top of the industry — which models are launching, which are highly anticipated, which excel at which use cases — and recommend internally what Venice should support. You are the single source of truth for everything the company needs to know about every model that exists and the owner of this internally-serving product.

This role works closely with product managers, engineering, marketing, and the leadership team. Your job is to ensure the models Venice offers are everything users could want — including the guidance and information they need to confidently choose the right model for the job.

What You’ll Do

• Own the model portfolio, end to end. Decide which models live on the platform — and which don't. Define tiering across free, Pro, Pro Plus, Max, and maintain the offerings matrix by product line (Chat, API, Studio). Curate thoughtfully: the goal is a portfolio that is all-encompassing, tailored to the user base, and easy-to-use.
• Build the models-as-product operating system. Establish launch processes including pre-release testing, configuration review, documentation, and launch communication. Define config standards, uptime SLAs, deprecation policies, and runbooks. Model metadata and discovery should be accessible and consistent.
• Drive reliability. Define health standards for every model tier. Monitor uptime and fallback performance, triage incidents, lead post-mortems, and ensure load-bearing models have appropriate provider redundancy. Instrument the dashboards that matter: TTFT, TPOT, cache hit rates.
• Identify and scope new product offerings. Own models-as-a-product beyond the existing catalog: spotting opportunities where Venice should build or offer new model products, and turning those opportunities into scoped, actionable bets. You'll make the case: what to build, why now, what it costs, what success looks like, and then drive it from concept to launch.
• Be the expert on all our models. The model landscape doesn't sit still — providers change pricing, discounts appear and expire, reliability shifts, and new releases land weekly. You'll continuously monitor our entire catalog against what providers are actually offering, and flag drift the moment it happens so we can make the right call. You won't just report drift — you'll recommend the change, drive the decision, and make sure it ships.
• Own model strategy for each product. You'll know how our users actually behave — what they ask for, where they hit friction, which models they gravitate toward and which they abandon — and use that understanding to map models to use cases across every Venice product. Working hand-in-hand with each product's PM, you'll recommend the right model lineup for their surface area: which model should be the default, which fits a given workflow, and which models should be recommended to certain users. Every product deserves a deliberate model strategy, not a default picked by habit.
• Turn signals into roadmap. Convert evaluation results, usage patterns, and customer feedback into prioritization recommendations. Evaluate and benchmark models to ensure they meet Venice's uncensored, privacy-first standards before they ship.
• Work across the org, not in a silo. You'll work closely with Engineering, API, Business Intelligence, Product Management, and Marketing. You’ll make strategic calls; you also make sure they're implemented correctly.

*We retain the right to change or assign other duties to this position.

Who You Are

• You're a product manager with real technical fluency. You have 10+ years in product management, ideally across infrastructure, dev tools, or AI/ML platforms. You can triage model and configuration issues before escalating to engineering, and you understand the nuances of model performance metrics and have the ability to dig deep into error root causes.
• You think in unit economics. You can reason about COGS and margin per inference request, and make cost/speed trade-off decisions with incomplete data. You've made hard prioritization calls and can defend them.
• You've operated in ambiguous, fast-moving environments. Model releases land weekly. You bring durable operating mechanisms — owners, decision criteria, dashboards, runbooks.
• You're comfortable with the tooling. APIs, inference systems, observability data, evaluation tooling, and cross-functional launch processes. Bonus: experience model configurations or AI infrastructure.
• You align with the mission. You understand what uncensored model testing and privacy-first positioning require operationally, and believe in their product advantages.