Applied AI Lead, Owner.com
$140-180k
Salary in USD and may vary in further locations. + Pre-IPO equity package
Online ordering and restaurant marketing system
Be an early applicant
Online ordering and restaurant marketing system
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$140-180k
Salary in USD and may vary in further locations. + Pre-IPO equity package
201-500 employees
Company mission
To give independent restaurants the infrastructure tools they need to compete with larger corporations.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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!
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
Our take
The Pandemic caused a major upheaval in the US restaurant industry. Smaller operations struggled to stay afloat amidst brick-and-mortar closures, and as the demand for home delivery soared their margins were tightened further by hefty third-party delivery app charges. Add to that the fact that consumers become customers of the delivery app, not the restaurant itself, and it’s a development that has spelt real trouble for independent locales. Owner has set out to level the playing field.
Owner’s platform provides independent restaurants with the infrastructure they need to take control of their business without deferring to third-party apps like GrubHub and Deliveroo. It offers marketing, online ordering, and support solutions to over 10,000 restaurants across the U.S. The company has taken impressive first strides, too: they have a 7 figure run-rate, over 105% monthly revenue retention, and helped restaurants avoid millions in online order platform fees.
It’s a hugely attractive proposition for independent business owners, and research suggests it’s a winning idea for consumers too. Over 60% say they’d prefer to deal with restaurants directly, but historically the infrastructure simply hasn’t been in place to do so. With Owner seeing impressive traction by tripling its customers between 2023 and 2024, it's unsurprising that its 2025 funding is being channelled into engineering and design teams, alongside the development of new tools.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
May 2025
$120m
SERIES C
Jan 2024
$33m
SERIES B
Total funding: $185.7m
Company benefits
- Work from anywhere: Our flexible policy lets you work from wherever you want.
- Equity in Owner: All full-time employees in eligible countries receive pre-IPO equity in Owner.
- Benefits to support your success: We set you up for success where you are and where you’re going.
- Healthcare Coverage: We offer comprehensive health, dental and vision plans.
- Unlimited PTO: Your schedule, your choice. We give our team members full empowerment to choose the time they want to work, and don’t micro-manage working hours.
- Team retreats: We love building real friendships with everyone that we work with, so we do several retreats per year – to deepen our friendships, celebrate our wins, and plan our future.
Company HQ
Presidio of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Adam Guild
(Co-Founder & CEO)Thiel Fellow, Forbes 30 Under 30 List.
Dean Bloembergen
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously Co-founder and CTO at Marble Technologies, Forbes 30 under 30.
Share this job
View 41 more jobs at Owner.com