Artificial Intelligence Director

About BalanX Bio

BalanX Bio is building AI-driven technology at the intersection of emotional intelligence, wellness, personalized digital experiences, and advanced human-centered systems. Our goal is to create AI products that understand users more deeply over time, support healthier daily living, and enable more adaptive, personalized, and emotionally intelligent digital interactions.

We are looking for an exceptional Artificial Intelligence Director to join the company at a foundational stage with a potential pathway toward cofounder status and meaningful long-term equity ownership. This is a senior leadership opportunity for someone who can help shape the company’s AI vision, technical architecture, product roadmap, research direction, team structure, and long-term innovation strategy.

Position Overview

The Artificial Intelligence Director will be responsible for defining, building, and executing BalanX Bio’s AI strategy across product, research, engineering, infrastructure, and internal development. This role requires both high-level strategic leadership and hands-on technical ability.

The ideal candidate should be able to lead AI system design, guide technical teams, evaluate emerging technologies, build scalable AI infrastructure, support product development, and establish responsible AI practices. This person should be comfortable working in an early-stage startup environment where priorities evolve quickly and where strong judgment, ownership, and execution are essential.

This role is designed for someone who is not only an AI expert, but also a builder, technical leader, systems thinker, and potential company-building partner.

Key Responsibilities

1. AI Strategy, Vision, and Roadmap Define and lead the company’s AI strategy, technical direction, and long-term AI roadmap. Translate business goals, product needs, and research concepts into actionable AI development plans. Identify high-impact AI opportunities across wellness technology, digital companions, personalized user experiences, internal tools, product automation, and research pipelines. Prioritize AI initiatives based on feasibility, technical value, product impact, cost, scalability, and company stage. Work closely with the CEO and leadership team to align AI development with company objectives, fundraising needs, partnership opportunities, and product milestones. Develop clear success metrics for AI initiatives and communicate progress, challenges, risks, and recommendations to executive leadership. Help the broader team understand AI capabilities, limitations, timelines, and technical tradeoffs.
2. Technical Leadership and Architecture Lead the design and development of scalable AI system architecture for BalanX Bio’s products. Provide hands-on technical direction for AI/ML platforms, model pipelines, data infrastructure, inference systems, and deployment workflows. Support the development of AI systems involving large language models, multimodal AI, generative AI, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, personalization, and context-aware response systems. Design systems that can integrate text, voice, visual, behavioral, emotional, and sensor-based signals where appropriate. Guide decisions around model selection, API usage, fine-tuning, retrieval design, model evaluation, inference optimization, and long-term technical scalability. Establish engineering standards for model development, testing, evaluation, monitoring, version control, deployment, and documentation. Evaluate technical tradeoffs related to performance, latency, cost, reliability, data privacy, model safety, and scalability. Lead make-versus-buy decisions involving third-party AI tools, vendors, cloud platforms, APIs, and open-source technologies.
3. Product and Applied AI Development Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to turn AI concepts into practical product features. Support the development of personalized AI experiences, emotionally intelligent user interactions, adaptive response systems, and wellness-oriented product workflows. Help define how AI should behave across user-facing experiences, including tone, personalization, safety, memory, and contextual awareness. Work with design and product teams on AI-powered interfaces, avatar-related experiences, digital companion features, dashboards, and user journey improvements. Ensure AI features are not only technically impressive, but also useful, understandable, reliable, and aligned with real user needs. Help evaluate prototypes, MVPs, internal demos, and production-ready systems. Identify technical risks early and help the company avoid overbuilding, overpromising, or pursuing unrealistic product claims.
4. MLOps, Data Infrastructure, and Deployment Establish and improve MLOps practices across the company’s AI development workflow. Design model lifecycle processes for experimentation, training, testing, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration. Support data pipeline design, data quality practices, model performance tracking, and evaluation infrastructure. Help implement systems for model monitoring, error analysis, safety testing, drift detection, latency measurement, and output quality assessment. Work with cloud infrastructure and engineering teams to support scalable and cost-efficient AI deployment. Provide guidance on cloud platforms, GPU/compute resources, inference infrastructure, databases, vector databases, APIs, and backend architecture. Ensure AI systems are designed with reliability, maintainability, security, and operational readiness in mind.
5. Team Leadership and Mentorship Help build, structure, and lead the AI team as the company grows. Mentor AI engineers, machine learning engineers, data scientists, researchers, interns, and technical contributors. Provide technical review, feedback, and guidance on AI-related projects. Help team leads make better technical decisions and maintain alignment across different AI workstreams. Support hiring and evaluation of AI talent, including reviewing resumes, participating in interviews, and helping define future team needs. Promote a culture of technical excellence, clear communication, responsible innovation, accountability, and practical execution. Organize technical discussions, roadmap reviews, architecture sessions, research reviews, and team alignment meetings as needed.
6. Responsible AI, Safety, and Governance Develop responsible AI principles, standards, and internal guidelines for BalanX Bio’s AI systems. Help design safeguards for sensitive use cases involving emotional data, wellness information, user behavior, and personalized AI interactions. Support work related to bias mitigation, fairness, explainability, transparency, safety testing, hallucination reduction, and user protection. Establish internal review processes for high-risk AI features or claims. Work with leadership, legal, privacy, compliance, and security stakeholders to ensure AI development is aligned with ethical and regulatory expectations. Support documentation for model behavior, system limitations, data usage, risk assessments, and product safety considerations. Ensure the company’s AI direction remains ambitious but responsible, realistic, and professionally defensible.
7. Research, Innovation, and External Engagement Monitor emerging developments in AI, machine learning, multimodal models, AI agents, personalization, affective computing, generative AI, and health technology. Identify relevant research papers, open-source tools, technical frameworks, and industry trends that may benefit the company. Lead or support internal R&D projects, experiments, proofs of concept, and technical prototypes. Build relationships with universities, researchers, advisors, technical communities, AI startups, cloud providers, and potential strategic partners. Contribute to thought leadership, technical documentation, publications, patents, or open-source work where appropriate. Help the company remain competitive and technically credible in a rapidly evolving AI landscape.
8. Executive Partnership and Company Building Serve as a key AI advisor to the CEO and leadership team. Support company strategy, fundraising conversations, investor materials, partnership discussions, and technical due diligence. Communicate AI vision, architecture, roadmap, risks, and progress clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences. Help define the company’s technical identity and long-term defensibility. Contribute to major strategic decisions related to product direction, hiring, partnerships, infrastructure, intellectual property, and market positioning. Act as a senior company-building partner with a strong sense of ownership and accountability. Qualifications Required Qualifications Strong background in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, computer science, engineering, mathematics, statistics, computational biology, or a related technical field. Demonstrated experience building, deploying, or leading AI/ML systems beyond basic prototypes. Strong understanding of modern AI systems, including large language models, generative AI, model evaluation, retrieval-augmented generation, and AI product development. Experience designing or contributing to scalable AI architecture, data pipelines, model workflows, or production AI systems. Ability to lead technical teams, mentor contributors, and communicate complex AI concepts clearly. Strong product judgment and ability to connect technical decisions to business and user outcomes. Ability to work independently in a fast-moving startup environment with ambiguity and evolving priorities. Strong ethical judgment, especially when working with sensitive user data, health-related concepts, emotional AI, or personalized systems. Excellent written and verbal communication skills. Preferred Qualifications Prior experience as an AI Director, Head of AI, AI Lead, ML Lead, CTO, technical founder, senior AI engineer, principal ML engineer, or similar leadership role. Experience with large language models, multimodal models, AI agents, RAG systems, long-context systems, fine-tuning, post-training, or model alignment. Experience with affective computing, emotional AI, personalization systems, digital companions, wellness technology, or human-centered AI products. Experience with MLOps, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, model monitoring, CI/CD, GPU infrastructure, inference optimization, or scalable AI deployment. Experience with Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex, vector databases, cloud platforms, or related AI tools. Familiarity with AWS, GCP, Azure, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, databases, APIs, and backend architecture. Experience working with product, design, engineering, research, and executive teams. Experience in healthtech, wellness, biotechnology, computational biology, genomics, or data-sensitive AI applications is a plus. Publications, patents, open-source contributions, prior startup experience, or prior founder/cofounder experience are strong pluses. Personal Attributes Visionary but practical: able to think ambitiously while still delivering realistic, high-quality execution. Strong ownership mindset and willingness to build from the ground up. Comfortable with both strategy and hands-on technical work. Honest and direct communicator who can push back on unrealistic technical decisions when needed. Deep curiosity about AI, human behavior, wellness, personalization, and future human-computer interaction. Strong ethical compass and commitment to responsible AI development. Collaborative leader who can work across technical and non-technical teams. Resilient, adaptable, and comfortable working in an early-stage company environment. Mission-driven and excited to help build a company with long-term impact. Compensation and Cofounder Path

This role is intended for a senior AI leader who may grow into a cofounder-level position. Compensation, equity, title structure, and long-term role expectations will be discussed directly with qualified candidates based on experience, commitment level, company stage, and mutual fit.

The position may include a meaningful equity opportunity and a pathway toward cofounder status for the right candidate who demonstrates strong technical leadership, strategic alignment, long-term commitment, and company-building capability.

Why Join BalanX Bio
Join at a foundational stage and help shape the company’s core AI direction.
Work directly with the executive team on product, strategy, architecture, and company-building.
Lead the development of AI systems focused on personalization, emotional intelligence, wellness, and human-centered digital experiences.
Build and mentor an AI team from the ground up.
Gain meaningful ownership and long-term upside through a potential cofounder pathway.
Work remotely with a mission-driven, multidisciplinary team.
Help create technology that is ambitious, responsible, and designed to improve people’s lives.
How to Apply

Interested candidates should submit a resume, LinkedIn profile, portfolio or project examples if available, and a brief statement describing their AI leadership experience and interest in BalanX Bio.

Applications may be sent to:

[email protected]

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Artificial Intelligence Director / Cofounder Application – [Your Name]