Director of AI Engineering

Location : Remote - United States only. About the role: Ottimate is building the AI-native future of accounts payable. Our platform processes millions of invoices across hundreds of enterprise customers, powered by a suite of ML models and agentic workflows.

As Director of AI Engineering, you will own the full AI and ML layer of our product — from invoice understanding and vendor intelligence to our conversational AP Copilot and the next generation of autonomous AP agents. This is a hands-on leadership role.

You will spend at least half your time writing code, architecting systems, and driving technical decisions alongside your team. You will also set the AI roadmap, partner cross-functionally with Product, Data, and Platform Engineering, and manage a distributed team of 8–10 engineers across Data and ML.

We are looking for a senior technical manager or director — ideally someone who has thrived at a smaller company and is ready for a career step up into broader ownership.

If you are energized by shipping real AI products, working with noisy real-world financial data, and building the systems that will define how enterprises automate AP, this role is for you.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership Architect and ship production AI/ML systems — you write code, not just review it Own the AI roadmap end-to-end: prioritization, trade-offs, delivery Set technical standards for model quality, evals, observability, and reliability Drive adoption of agentic coding tools to multiply team velocity Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or equivalent — measure and improve PR throughput Partner with Platform Engineering on infrastructure, data pipelines, and APIs People & Cross-Functional Manage a distributed team of 8–10 engineers across Data and ML disciplines Hire, develop, and retain engineers at all levels; build a high-trust remote culture Partner with Product on roadmap sequencing and scope trade-offs Work directly with customer-facing teams to close feedback loops on model quality