Applied AI Lead

About Owner

Owner is the AI-native system local business owners use to succeed, starting with restaurants.

We're building the system that replaces the many tools owners use to run their business.

It powers everything from the restaurant's website, online ordering, CRM, POS, and more.

Product philosophy

Most small business software makes owners do the work to get what they want: sales growth and profit growth. Owner does the work for them agentically.

Our system drives demand, converts it, and helps operators run their business day to day. As it improves, the business improves with it.

Using Owner should feel like having a team of great operators, engineers, and marketers working for you.

Our vision

We're starting by helping independent restaurants succeed online.

But it's not just restaurants that need our help. Most local businesses are struggling with these same problems. Huge technology corporations are taking their customers, bleeding their profits, and making it hard for them to survive.

Once we nail the solution for restaurants - we'll scale it into every other local business type.

In the future we envision, tens of millions of local business owners will use our technology to succeed in the digital age.

Read our Series C memo here → https://www.owner.com/c

Our traction

Since 2020, we've generated tens of millions in revenue and processed over a billion dollars of online orders. 1 in 5 Americans have used an Owner.com http://Owner.com website.

More importantly, we've helped over 20,000 restaurant owners, and saved them nearly $200 million in fees.

Our team

Our team is now in the low hundreds. We've got top talent from the most successful companies in SMB software, including: Shopify, HubSpot, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Rappi, Faire and Stripe.

We'll be scaling even faster in 2026 to keep pace with our customer growth.

Where we work

Owner is a remote-first, global company headquartered in San Francisco, with a sales hub in Toronto. For a few of our roles we prioritize in-person collaboration at one of our office locations. Most of our teammates are distributed throughout the globe. Please review the role description and discuss with your recruiter for more details on location!

Why we are looking for you

We are scaling Owner's Applied AI organization. This is a fast-paced team that works on the most valuable opportunities we can find anywhere in the business. As an Applied AI Lead, you'll be responsible for finding those opportunities in the first place: looking across everything happening at Owner, understanding where AI can have the most impact, and sizing the potential before a single line of code gets written. Then you'll build, ship, and iterate on the solution until the impact shows up.

Some of these opportunities create efficiency by cutting out manual work that no longer needs to be manual. Others create better outcomes entirely: processes that now perform far beyond what they used to, and things we always wanted to do that only became practical with AI. You'll chase both, and you'll be the one deciding which come first.

This role is 100% remote and can be based anywhere in the United States or Canada.

💫 You should definitely apply if you...

- Care more about picking the right problem than about using the fanciest tool for it

- Love the hunt: scanning a business, finding what's broken or underpowered, and putting a number on the prize

- Get more energy from building and shipping than from analyzing and presenting

- Dive deep to understand root causes when solving problems, and become a subject matter expert along the way

- Aren't afraid to pick up new tools and skills, from Claude Code to custom ML pipelines, whatever the problem requires

- Want to see your work change the numbers, and feel unsatisfied until it does

- Thrive in ambiguity and don't need a playbook to figure out what to work on next

What we've built so far

- LLM-powered binary classifier for restaurant concept fit with Owner's product. Ran on over 300k establishments in the US.

- Hyperpersonalized outbound email engine, sending around 5k unique emails daily with a best-in-class reply rate.

- Automated pre-call research tool, eliminating the manual work that sales reps previously had to complete before every dial. Increased dial volume by almost double.

- Gradient Boosted Tree for predicting call pickup rate. Trained on dozens of features across tens of thousands of pieces of data, resulting in up to a ~2.3x increased pickup rate for top-identified leads. (ML experience is NOT required for this role; we used Claude Code to teach ourselves enough ML to build this.)

- Intelligent routing (iRouting) system incorporating our new pickup rate prediction score to optimize lead distribution on a daily basis.

The impact you will have

- You'll own the map of AI opportunity across the business: identifying problems and opportunities, dissecting and sizing the