Director of Applied AI

Do you want to empower organizations to build smarter compensation strategies while ensuring fair pay for all employees?

Syndio is a Series C technology company leveraging advanced technology and responsible AI to accelerate decision-making, streamline compliance, and democratize insights for consistent, equitable compensation practices at scale. Backed by $83M in investments from Bessemer Venture Partners, Voyager Capital, and Emerson Collective, we are expanding our team and products to help companies align their rewards strategies with their business goals.

Our customers are our greatest asset. Syndio partners with many of the world’s most recognized and respected enterprises, helping them implement leading-edge compensation solutions with expert guidance. We analyze pay for over 10 million employees across dozens of countries, ensuring fair, defensible rewards that drive better business outcomes.

Join us in our mission to help companies make smarter pay decisions they can trust

We are looking for a Director of Applied AI to lead our Applied AI team of combined Backend and Machine Learning engineers, at a pivotal moment in our evolution. In this role, you’ll ship AI systems to production: building agents, deploying models, and integrating LLMs to help customers and internal users make faster, fairer, and more confident decisions. You’ll guide a team of high-performing engineers while also playing a key role in shaping the technical architecture of our platform.

You will join Syndio at an exciting moment, as we build our vision of Intelligent Pay, an AI native compensation recommendation platform. Your guidance and collaboration in building scalable software engineering solutions for our product suite will have a meaningful impact in helping companies achieve fairness in the workplace. 

Why this job is exciting

• Lead delivery of end-to-end AI systems: from rapid prototyping to production deployment.
• Use best in class cutting edge AI tools as part of your job, including Cursor, ChatGPT Enterprise, and Gemini.
• Work on cutting edge AI applications building innovative solutions for our customers and internal teams.
• Manage a team of highly skilled backend and ML engineers - creating a supportive work environment by coaching the team and paving the way for collective success.
• Model technical leadership to the engineers and be responsible for technical decisions made on your team.
• Contribute to and guide the engineering organization’s best practices, such as process improvements and communication.
• Collaborate across the entire engineering organization (backend, frontend, product,, and site reliability) to ensure projects meet all team requirements.
• Collaborate on the design and development of innovative features and services delivered to Syndio’s customers.
• Create a culture of diversity and belonging while also leading the hiring processes for new ML engineers.
• Help shape the future of fair pay through AI—at a moment of high growth
• Our tech stack: Golang and Python on the backend, Typescript written in React on the Frontend, running Kubernetes on GCP. Gemini is our LLM.

About You

• You have proven hands-on experience as an applied AI or ML  engineer, with a successful track record of innovative features deployed at scale.
• You have 4+ years of experience managing a high-performing engineering team
• You thrive on ambiguity and find clarity through iteration, experimentation, and collaboration.
• You stay current with advances in the AI/ML landscape and translate them into pragmatic value for your team and customers.
• You excel in a collaborative environment, supported by a strong team of design and engineering resources.
• You are ready to work with teams across the organization to ensure the needs of everyone are met as well as can be.
• Proven excellent communication skills that enable you to interface with both technical and non-technical teams.
• You bring proven problem-solving and critical thinking skills to our dynamic startup environment.
• You have experience in enterprise technology applications architecture, design, development, and maintenance, with a strong focus on performance, reliability, and security.
• You are data-driven, and able to make difficult prioritization decisions when needed
• You are passionate about our mission to close pay gaps and create fairness in the workplace.
• Proven experience with B2B-focused solution and architecture design

Role progression

• Within 1 month, you’ll be working on projects in partnership with data science, product and engineering, understand the strengths and weaknesses of our current engineering team and understand our strategy for the intelligent pay product vision.
• Within 3 months, you’ll be shipping value to customers, mentoring team members, and helping define engineering processes and MLOps best practices.
• Within 6 months, you’ll be celebrating with the team as we ship new, high-impact AI capabilities—and be shaping our roadmap for what’s next in Intelligent Pay and beyond.

• Check out our Employee Experience page for more information on our Mission & Values, Work-Life Balance, Pay Transparency, Diversity, Culture, and Benefits. 
• 💰 Competitive Compensation. For this role our salary is targeted at $210,000 -$245,000 USD per year. Final offer amounts are determined by factors such as experience and expertise. We take a geo neutral approach to compensation within the US, meaning that we pay based on job function and level, not location. 
• 🏆  Syndio Equity. So you can share in Syndio’s success.
• 🏝  Flexible Vacation Policy. We encourage our team to recharge when they need to, plus paid sick & safe time, compassion leave, and voting leave. 
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave
• 🩺  Medical, Dental, Vision. Syndio pays 90% of employee premiums, and 50% for dependents.
• 🏥  Life Insurance & Disability. Syndio covers the full premium.
• 🏦 401(k). To help you save for your future
• Fully remote model - #LI-Remote 

The interview overview

Below you'll find an outline of the interview plan for our Director of Applied AI position. Please note that this is what we expect the process to look like; we may ask you for supplemental information or require an additional step before making a final decision.

• 30 min interview with a member of our Talent Team
• 30 Minute interview with our Sr. Director of Data Science
• A 45 minute technical interview with one member from our Data Science team and one member from our ML team
• A 30 minute interview with our Sr. VP of Engineering

At Syndio, we're building a diverse team that values candor, curiosity, and community. If you share these values and are interested in joining us, we'd love to talk with you even if you don't 100% meet the "about you" listed here. We don't expect anyone to have all the answers, as long as you're willing to learn and grow with us.

Employees joining the Syndio team at this early stage of growth will impact this critical social issue and support a growing customer base (including Nordstrom, General Mills, Match Group, and others) to take tangible action on workplace fairness. 

Syndio is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are building an inclusive and collaborative workplace as we grow, and we welcome team members regardless of gender/identity, sexual orientation, race or cultural background, religion, physical disability and age.