Senior Director of AI, R&D & Agentic Systems

About Us QuillBot was founded in 2017 with a mission to help students and professionals strengthen their writing. Today, we help over 56 million people around the world create great things. Whether you're writing, designing, coding, or collaborating, QuillBot is a place where anyone can create at the speed of thought. Our AI-powered tools help you think clearly, communicate effectively, and create beautifully—across every platform, in any format, at any skill level. If you're passionate about using technology to make the path from inspiration to execution more accessible, intentional, and relevant, come join us. Role Overview As Senior Director of AI, you will serve as the primary architect of QuillBot’s intelligence layer, leading the evolution from a suite of AI tools to a unified, agent-driven AI-native creative platform. We are at an inflection point, transitioning rapidly from a collection of discrete capabilities into a cohesive system where users can move seamlessly from high-level intent to fully realized outputs across writing, research, and design. You will define and build the orchestration systems that unify QuillBot’s products into cohesive, multi-step workflows—enabling intelligent systems to plan, coordinate, and execute complex creative tasks. This role will define how intelligence is integrated across every QuillBot product experience. Reporting to the VP of AI, you will lead both AI R&D and Applied AI teams, shaping the model stack, agentic infrastructure, and production systems that power tens of millions of users. This role operates at the intersection of research, AI alignment, systems architecture, and product strategy, requiring technical depth, execution velocity, and the ability to drive alignment across Engineering, Product, and executive leadership. This role sits within QuillBot’s senior leadership team and carries significant influence over QuillBot’s technical direction, strategy, and tactical execution. In your first six months, you will: Ship and iterate on production agentic workflows connecting QuillBot's core tools and surfaces, proving the orchestration architecture under real user load Make high-conviction technical bets on the model stack, compute strategy, and agent execution model, with written rationale that the org can build against Own the technical point of view on which ICP verticals and workflows justify agentic investment, and drive that conviction into AI, product, and engineering planning Inherit and reshape the AI org to match the velocity and scope of what we're building, including hiring where gaps exist Responsibilities AI Architecture & Orchestration Design and lead systems for intent recognition, task decomposition, and multi-step execution across QuillBot’s product surfaces Define how agentic systems plan, coordinate, and execute workflows across a multi-surface application suite Establish standards for agent-native infrastructure, enabling product surfaces to be machine-readable and executable AI R&D & Multimodal Systems Lead research and development across text and multimodal domains, with an initial focus on text and image capabilities Build on QuillBot’s existing strengths in NLP while extending into new modalities to create differentiated product experiences Make model strategy decisions across proprietary and third-party systems, balancing capability, cost, and shipping velocity Applied AI & Platform Operations Drive the shipping cadence for model updates, MLOps, and data pipelines across high-scale production Own system reliability and performance of the AI stack serving tens of millions of users worldwide Balance system performance, latency, and cost through informed decisions on compute economics and architecture Leadership & Cross-Functional Alignment Build and lead an integrated AI organization spanning R&D and Applied AI teams Partner with the VP of AI and senior leadership to define technical direction, evaluate trade-offs, and guide platform-level decisions Drive alignment across Engineering, Product, and Design to ensure adoption of agent-native standards Raise the quality bar across the organization, acting as a force multiplier for team performance and execution Architect the team's operating model around AI-native workflows, using automated pipelines, code generation, and internal tooling to achieve output disproportionate to headcount Qualifications AI & Systems Expertise Experience building and shipping agentic systems or orchestration platforms in production at meaningful scale, not prototypes or research demos Distributed Agency: deep expertise coordinating diverse agent populations (plan-based, scripted, and hybrid) within stateful environments, including task decomposition, intent routing, and multi-step execution State & Persistence: proven ability to design and operate systems that maintain sustained, context-aware agency across multi-session and multi-