Senior Director of AI, R&D & Agentic Systems

**About Learneo**Learneo is a platform of builder-driven businesses, including Course Hero, CliffsNotes, LitCharts, Quillbot, Symbolab, and Scribbr, all united around a shared mission of supercharging productivity and learning for everyone. We attract and scale high growth businesses built and run by visionary entrepreneurs. Each team innovates independently but has a unique opportunity to collaborate, experiment, and grow together, and they are supported by centralized corporate operations functions, including HR, Finance and Legal.

****About QuillBot****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-domain workflows
• Compute Economics: ability to optimize sophisticated planning logic against the constraints of latency, unit economics, and reliability at consumer scale
• Background in NLP and/or multimodal AI (text and image preferred), with the ability to guide applied research, evaluate model architectures, and make binding technical decisions on model strategy across proprietary and third-party ecosystems

Leadership & Execution

• Proven leadership of both AI R&D and Applied AI/MLOps teams within consumer product environments serving millions of users
• Track record of scaling AI systems and infrastructure from early-stage builds (0→1) into high-scale production (1→10), not just inheriting mature platforms
• Forms strong technical opinions quickly, updates them based on evidence rather than consensus, and translates AI capabilities into product direction and business impact
• Has built or reshaped AI organizations to match the demands of a rapidly evolving technical mandate, including hiring, restructuring, and raising the performance bar

Cross-Functional Influence

• Drives alignment across Engineering, Product, and executive stakeholders through technical credibility and strategic clarity, not positional authority
• Operates effectively across global distributed teams and time zones

Bonus Points

• Experience with agent-to-tool communication frameworks or emerging standards (e.g., MCP, agent SDKs)
• Contributions to peer-reviewed research or involvement in the broader AI research community
• Experience with browser-based or edge compute environments (e.g., WebGPU)
• Background in creative, productivity, or prosumer software platforms
• Experience operating in founder-led or highly entrepreneurial environments

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive salary and annual bonus
• Medical coverage, including full dental and vision
• Retirement savings plans
• Life and disability benefits
• Vacation & leaves of absence
• Annual family planning stipend
• Social responsibility program (volunteer time off and donation matching)
• Developmental opportunities through education & developmental reimbursements & professional workshops
• Maternity & parental leave
• Hybrid & remote model with flexible working hours
• On-site & remote company events throughout the year
• Annual wellness stipend
• Monthly tech stipend
• Employee referral program
• Premium access to QuillBot

*Benefits and benefit amounts differ by region. A comprehensive list applicable to your region will be provided in your interview process. 

For positions in San Francisco, CA, and other locations where required, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. Other locations: IL, MA, NJ.

Research shows that candidates from underrepresented backgrounds often don't apply for roles if they don't meet all the criteria. We strongly encourage you to apply if you're interested: we'd love to learn how you can amplify our team with your unique experience!

This role is eligible for hire in the US.

We are a virtual-first company and have employees dispersed throughout the United States, Canada, India, Germany, and the Netherlands. We have a market-based pay structure that varies by location. The base pay for this position is dependent on multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed. You may also be eligible to participate in our bonus program and may be offered benefits, and other types of compensation.

#Learneo#LI-Remote#LI-JK1

In accordance with applicable pay transparency laws, we provide a good-faith base salary range for each role. Total compensation may also include equity, which is determined by role, level, and location. The base salary range for this role if filled within the following states is:

California and New York Pay Range

$249,000—$421,000 USD

Massachusetts and Washington Pay Range

$249,000—$378,000 USD

Minnesota and New Jersey Pay Range

$249,000—$337,000 USD

Colorado and Illinois Pay Range

$218,000—$337,000 USD

Vermont Pay Range

$218,000—$294,000 USD

Equal ​Employment Opportunity Statement ​(EEO)

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity and ​inclusion within our company.  ​We will consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender ​identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, ​veteran status, or ​ability status. We will ensure that individuals who are differently abled are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment as provided to other applicants or employees. Please contact us to request accommodation.