Head of AI

At Glacier, we are taking on one of the world’s most pressing problems: trash. Did you know that, in the US, over half of all recyclables end up in landfill? We're working to fix that. In doing so, we’ll also be reducing carbon emissions, energy consumption, and depletion of natural resources.

Glacier builds custom sorting robots designed to sort apart recyclables as well as AI-powered business analytics that enable recyclers to superpower their plants and improve our society’s circularity. These two products together are helping to divert tons of recyclables (literally!) from landfills every day.

We’re looking for a strong product development leader to spearhead our AI/Computer Vision efforts. A successful candidate could come from either a senior product management or engineering leadership background.

AI/Computer Vision is the foundation of both our products and plays a pivotal role in the company's success. This role reports directly to our founder.

About us:

• We’re a small team based in San Francisco. Our founders come from Facebook engineering and Bain consulting. As an early member of the Glacier team, you’ll have a significant role in shaping our company’s future.
• We started Glacier to have a major positive environmental impact and we are searching for teammates who share in that mission.
• We’re backed by top-tier VCs and angels with extensive technical and industry expertise.
• We have several robots and AI scanners in production at customer sites and a robust pipeline of upcoming deployments.

Responsibilities include:
Own the vision, strategy, and execution of Glacier's AI/Computer Vision roadmap. Create and deliver a roadmap that:

• Meets and exceeds near-term customers’ expectations of our AI
• Enables a dramatic expansion of Glacier’s commercial deployments starting in late 2024
• Incorporates cutting-edge developments in AI research to continuously uplevel our capabilities

Achieving these goals will involve:

• Close partnership with Glacier’s ML engineering team to 1) drive both high-level and day-to-day team execution, and 2) identify and nurture high-potential R&D and infra projects
• Close collaboration with Glacier’s founders, Sales team, and Operations team to align the CV roadmap with company strategy, market needs, and customer timelines
• Planning, advocating for, and helping hire new resources needed to deliver the roadmap, e.g., cross-functional hiring, third-party tools and services, etc.
• Planning and creating new processes needed to deliver the roadmap
• Serving as the customer-facing Glacier lead for special, AI-centric customer projects

Your day-to-day could look like: syncing with our contract labeling team to determine labeling priorities; problem-solving with an ML engineer to improve a CV model’s performance; aligning with Sales on a new AI deployment proposal; deep-diving on R&D project results to determine implications for our production CV system/processes; forecasting 12-month MLE hiring needs; and more.

Requirements
(If you don't think you meet all of the criteria but are excited about this role, please reach out anyway!)

• Demonstrated track record of defining and implementing roadmaps that 1 - extend 1+ years into the future, and 2 - incorporate significant experimental R&D
• Firsthand experience training ML models

• Requirements for candidates with product management backgrounds:

  • 5+ years of software PM experience
  • 2+ years of AI/ML PM experience
  • Bonus points for people management experience

• Requirements for candidates with engineering leadership backgrounds:

  • 2+ years of engineering management experience
  • 2+ years of AI/ML experience

• Experience at early-stage startups (<50 employees)

• Ability to work from our San Francisco office (SOMA neighborhood) at least two days each week

Bonus points:

• Management consulting experience
• Experience scaling cross-functional teams
• Experience evaluating and managing third-party service providers

What traits will make you successful in this role:

• Ruthless prioritization - Ability to make difficult trade-offs to achieve results, weighing rapidly changing information and resource constraints

• Strategic thinking - Ability to devise creative solutions to complex challenges, including balancing deployment capacity, engineering capabilities, customer demands, and company goals

• Strong organization - Ability to keep many immediate projects on track while also keeping long-term, strategic priorities in mind

• Effective communication and stakeholder management - Ability to communicate and work with a variety of stakeholders, including prospective customers (corporate and front-line), Engineering, Sales, and Operations

• Ownership mentality - Proactively identify, flag, and solve problems with minimal direction or supervision, involving stakeholders where appropriate

Compensation:
The total cash compensation range for this role is $150,000 - $225,000. In addition to cash compensation, Glacier also offers competitive equity compensation and benefits. The final compensation for this role will depend on many individualized factors, including job-related skills and knowledge, experience level, interview performance, and other factors.