Head of Artificial Intelligence - AI - Co-Founder

Operis Facility Technologies is revolutionizing the facility operations industry with FRED, the first-of-its-kind Facilities Resource & Equipment Database - AI Agent. The mission is to empower essential workers who maintain building operations by providing unparalleled speed, clarity, and capability through the power of AI. Currently, FRED is in a live pilot at Xavier University, and inviting others to join the waitlist to customize their own AI assistant. Learn more about our innovative solutions at [FREDknows.com]

This is a startup - A solo-founder-with-an-advisor startup. That means no polished HR department, no perfect playbooks, and no salary, at least not yet. This role is equity-based compensation to start, with a path to salaried comp as we close paying contracts and raise. If that's a dealbreaker, I totally get it. If it's exciting, keep reading.

The Role: AI Lead (Founding Team)

You'll own FRED's AI roadmap alongside the founder. That means shipping new capabilities, pushing what FRED can do with NLP, retrieval, computer vision, and agentic workflows and building the internal AI tooling that lets a small team punch way above its weight.

This isn't a "manage a team of engineers" role. It's a "you ARE the AI team" role, at least for now. You'll prototype fast, ship to real customers, watch what breaks, and iterate. You'll have a direct line to facility technicians using FRED every day, which means your work has immediate, visible impact.

Who We're Looking For

Honestly, I care less about your resume than how you actually spend your time.

* You're already deep in the AI ecosystem and you've shipped things with Claude, GPT, Grok, Gemini, open-source models, whatever works. You know the difference between RAG, fine-tuning, and agentic frameworks because you've actually tried them.

* You read AI announcements the day they drop and have an opinion. You've probably built something with a model that came out last month.

* You're comfortable with vector databases, embeddings, prompt engineering, and stitching together APIs to make something that didn't exist yesterday.

* You've built side projects, shipped weird experiments, or have a GitHub/portfolio that shows you make things.

* You think in use cases and outcomes, not just architecture diagrams. You'd rather get something in front of a real user this week than spend a month designing the perfect system.

* You're okay with ambiguity, scrappy tools, and figuring it out as you go.

* You want ownership of an AI product that's going somewhere.

Nice to Have (but not required)

* Experience with facility operations, construction trades or industries where workers don't sit at desks.

* Computer vision experience (FRED's roadmap includes equipment recognition)

* Founder or early-startup experience

* A formal CS or AI background - degrees are great, but shipping is greater

What This Won't Be

* A 9-to-5 with a clear job description

* A role where you wait for someone to tell you what to build

* A safe bet

What It Could Be

* A founding-team seat at a company solving real problems the AI world hasn't really noticed yet and the giant institutional knowledge gap left behind as Baby Boomer facility experts retire. If you want to build something real with AI, in an industry that genuinely needs it, let's talk.

Working Environment

* This is a remote based role, but I prefer someone that is within driving distance to Cincinnati in order to do in-person working sessions and collaboration at least 1-4 times per month.