Director of AI
Director of AI/ML Engineering
TENEX.AI · Cybersecurity / Managed Detection & Response · 20-75 employees · 📍 San Jose, CA
Ground-floor AI engineering leadership role at a well-funded, AI-native MDR cybersecurity startup, responsible for architecting and scaling LLM-powered autonomous threat detection and response systems.
AI Maturity
advanced
Reports To
CTO
Why Role Exists
New position
Company Stage
startup
Source
linkedin
Key Responsibilities
- Define and own technical architecture for AI-driven autonomous detection, RAG investigation, and auto-remediation workflows
- Build and productionize large-scale LLMs, graph-based reasoning engines, and streaming feature pipelines processing billions of security events
- Lead, mentor, and grow multiple engineering teams; run design reviews and uphold code quality with a security-first mindset
- Own AI evaluation lifecycle including prompt libraries, fine-tuning, red-team testing, latency budgets, and fallback strategies
- Drive engineering execution and delivery of complex software systems in alignment with product strategy
Requirements
- Proven experience leading AI/ML engineering teams, including managing team leads
- Hands-on expertise with LLMs, RAG architectures, and production ML systems at scale
- Experience building distributed systems handling high-volume data pipelines (billions of events)
- Strong background in software engineering best practices: code quality, security-first design, system reliability
- Ability to set and execute technical strategy in a fast-moving startup environment
Signals
- ⚠ No salary range disclosed
- ⚠ Title is Director but scope reads closer to VP Engineering — potential title/level mismatch
- ⚠ Multiple office locations listed (San Jose, Sarasota, Kansas City) — cultural cohesion complexity at early stage
- ⚠ Posting cuts off mid-sentence suggesting hasty or incomplete JD
- ✓ Backed by a16z seed, Crosspoint Capital, Shield Capital, DTCP, and Florida Opportunity Fund — strong, multi-tier investor syndicate
- ✓ AI-native product with genuine technical depth — not AI-washing
- ✓ Early employee framing with equity upside explicitly highlighted
- ✓ Clear, specific technical scope (RAG, LLMs, graph reasoning, streaming pipelines) signals an engineering-literate hiring team
- ✓ Rapidly growing with recent substantial funding round