Director of AI Engineering, AI Labs

You'll lead the AI Labs technical team at Via, with a mandate to move fast, experiment boldly, and build AI-powered products that can fundamentally change how Via and partner cities operate. This is a rare opportunity to be both a hands-on technical leader and a people leader, managing a small team of exceptional senior engineers while remaining deeply embedded in the work yourself. You'll have real autonomy, direct access to leadership, and the backing of a company already at scale - without the constraints that usually come with it. If you've built AI products end-to-end and you're energized by doing that in an entrepreneurial, fast-paced mode, with a blank canvas and a world-class team around you, this is the role for you.

Responsibilities

• Lead, develop, and inspire a small team of highly skilled AI engineers, setting technical direction and building a culture of ownership and experimentation
• Own the engineering execution of the AI Labs roadmap, ensuring the team ships production-grade AI products reliably
• Contribute directly to architecture decisions, backend systems, and code that powers AI-driven features at scale
• Work closely with customers in a forward-deployed manner to understand problems and iterate quickly on scalable agentic solutions
• Lead technical scoping workshops, directly interfacing with city leaders to solve local problems with agentic workflows
• Drive engineering across a varied roadmap spanning data consolidation, predictive modelling, real-time decision-making, and LLM-powered experiences
• Collaborate with product, data science, and operations teams to identify and prioritize the highest-impact AI opportunities
• Stay close to the frontier of AI development and bring new ideas, tools, and approaches into the team

Requirements

• 10+ years of hands-on experience building and shipping AI-powered products end-to-end, with deep expertise across the AI/ML stack including LLMs, predictive modelling, and production data infrastructure
• Experienced in leading senior engineering talent, setting a high bar and giving direct feedback
• Strong backend engineering skills, comfortable designing scalable APIs and working with distributed systems
• Energized by ambiguity and early-stage environments, able to create clarity for the team
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills
• Comfortable with travel to collaborate on-site with partners and customers

Benefits

• Free medical plans
• 401K matching
• Catered lunch on Wednesdays