AI Native Engineering Tech Lead, Guild Education
$217.7-236.6k
+ Stock options
Upskilling and education platform for America's workforce
Open for applications
Upskilling and education platform for America's workforce
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$217.7-236.6k
+ Stock options
1001+ employees
Company mission
To unlock opportunity for America’s workforce through education and upskilling.
Role
Who you are
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in a leadership role
- Strong track record building scalable web applications across frontend (React/JavaScript/TypeScript) and backend (microservices, APIs, databases) systems
- Experienced in integrating machine learning models into production systems and collaborating with ML teams on model deployment and optimization. Familiar with key concepts like model serving, inference, feature stores, and techniques such as LLMs and recommender systems
- Skilled in integrating third-party AI services like OpenAI or Vertex AI, with a strong grasp of API design patterns. Understands authentication, latency management, error handling, and cost control for AI API usage
- Effective leadership and communication abilities, including driving technical roadmaps, mentoring engineers and working cross-functionally to align engineering decisions with product, design, and business goals
- User-centered engineer with experience designing systems that deliver personalized, context-aware experiences
- Creative and pragmatic problem-solver who thrives in ambiguity and evaluates tradeoffs thoughtfully
- Familiarity with technologies like semantic search, embeddings, real-time data pipelines, and event-driven systems is a plus
What the job involves
- Guild is hiring a Tech Lead for our AI Native Experiences team. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone excited to shape the future of AI-first product development at Guild
- As a “player/coach,” you’ll set the technical vision for how we embed AI into our platform; guiding architecture, frameworks, and best practices; while also writing code and contributing to key projects
- You’ll lead a talented team of engineers in building scalable, reusable tools that make AI feel native to our products and systems
- From integrating with external model APIs and internal MLOps pipelines to delivering intelligent, personalized features at scale, you’ll ensure technical excellence across the board
- Working closely with engineering management, product, design, and data science, you’ll help align roadmaps and deliver high-impact AI capabilities that serve our learners and partners. This role is central to Guild’s evolution into an AI-native product organization, where AI enhances every layer of the experience
- Define, evolve, and implement the technical roadmap for AI-native products and systems across Guild’s web products
- Design and develop core components and frontend infrastructure that support inference workflows - dynamic response UI, semantic search interfaces, summarization zones
- Evaluate, select, and integrate external model APIs and internal inference pipelines in collaboration with MLOps
- Collaborate with other cross-functional teams to ensure they are educated and equipped to use the tooling you build. Ensure standards, paved paths, and guardrails are in place to prevent fragmentation in how AI is used across teams
- Prototype new UX interaction models (e.g. chat, autocompletion, inline generation) and bring the best into production
- Define the technical strategy and architecture for integrating AI into Guild’s user-facing products. Choose the right tools and deployment methods to build scalable, maintainable, and secure AI-native features
- Act as a player/coach; writing code while guiding the team through design reviews, technical challenges, and best practices in AI development. Mentor engineers to strengthen their ML and AI application skills
- Create reusable tools, APIs, and UI components to simplify embedding AI across Guild’s products. Ensure these resources are standardized, well-documented, and easy for other teams to adopt
- Partner with Product, Design, and MLOps to define AI feature roadmaps, assess feasibility, and align technical plans with user needs and ethical design. Ensure seamless integration of model training, deployment, and monitoring across teams
- Monitor and optimize the performance of AI features for speed, accuracy, and reliability. Establish strong testing and alerting systems to uphold quality, security, and ethical standards in production AI systems
- Advocate for the transformative potential of AI in education and workforce advancement
Our take
The recruitment process can be the most costly element of a company's operation, with future-proof skillset requirements resulting in the hiring of staff for niche tasks. Many existing employees of a company could have the potential to fill talent gaps and prevent the need for a new hire, but they often lack the training for such roles. Helping to solve this problem, Guild Education helps employers partner with nonprofit universities to train staff across a variety of subject matters, including high school completion programs, vocational opportunities, and enrollment in higher education.
As professional development is a strong employer benefit, Guild Education also pitches itself as a perk for employees, aiming to increase retention and worker satisfaction. By solving two major problems - a skills shortage and worker retention, it has gained large companies such as Chipotle, Target, Hilton and PepsiCo as corporate clients.
Guild Education closed a Series F financing round in 2022 led by Wellington Management and with participation from Oprah Winfrey. The company is using this funding to develop its healthcare and financial services learning modules and increase its offering to workers by exploring new ways to lower the barriers to learning, for instance through childcare solutions and financial wellness tools.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-5% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jun 2022
$265m
SERIES F
Jun 2021
$150m
SERIES E
Total funding: $643.5m
Company benefits
- Access to low-cost, high-quality health care options through Cigna and Kaiser (due to coverage limitations, Kaiser is currently only available in CA & CO)
- Access to a 401k to help save for the future
- Open vacation policy for employees to rest and recharge
- 8 days of fully-paid sick leave, to take the time to heal and or recover
- Family-friendly benefits, including 12 weeks of parental leave for non-birthing parents and 18-20 weeks for birthing parents; 4-week ramp-up period for when employees return from a leave of 6 weeks or more; as well as employer-paid short-term and long-term disability, employer-sponsored life insurance, fertility and caregiving benefits
- Well-rounded wellness benefits including free and low cost mental health resources and financial wellbeing support services
- Education benefits and tuition assistance to help your future development and growth
Company HQ
Central Business District, Denver, CO
Leadership
Rachel Carlson
(CEO & Founder)Prior to co-founding Guild Education, was founder and CEO of Blueprint. Before that was a Director at American Honours and an Associate with The Parthenon Group.
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