Director of AI Ops, Wine Market Intelligence

Remote · Full time · Leadership · Equity

CruRank already aggregates the major houses into one honest, normalized, public dataset that outclasses the tired terminals charging by the search. The next chapter is intelligence on top of a winning base: automated matching at scale, anomaly and trend detection, narrative generation grounded in real numbers, and a research and alerting layer that feels alive. We want a leader who sees that future clearly and is hungry to build it on a foundation that already works.

What you will lead

The AI and automation strategy across the whole stack: from the matching and entity resolution layer that decides what a wine is, to the models that surface movers, regressions and outliers before anyone else sees them.
A production discipline for AI Ops: pipelines, evaluation, monitoring, cost control and reproducibility, so automated outputs are as trustworthy as the hand verified ones. Every claim the system makes traces back to a real sale.
Grounded generation. We publish a weekly auction tape and charted deep dives. You build the systems that draft them from the data with rigor and no hallucinated numbers, so the editorial voice scales without losing credibility.
The research and alerting frontier: smarter Wants, watchlists, fair value estimation, and signals that turn a public archive into a tool collectors and the trade cannot live without.
A growing team. You hire, set the technical bar, and own the outcomes.

What you bring

Real depth in applied machine learning and data systems in production, with scars to show for it. You know the difference between a demo and a system people trust with money decisions.
Strong opinions on AI Ops: evaluation harnesses, drift, monitoring, cost per task, and keeping recurring automated jobs cheap and reliable rather than expensive and brittle.
Judgment about where models help and where they hurt. In a domain where a wrong price destroys trust, you know when to automate and when to hold the line on verification.
Leadership presence. You set vision, recruit strong people, and still read a pipeline and a model eval yourself.
Passion for the industry. Wine, collectibles, alternative assets, market structure: something here genuinely pulls you, because that conviction is what carries a category lead.

Nice to have

Experience grounding language models on proprietary structured data without fabrication.
Background in market data, indices, pricing or financial intelligence.
A point of view on why the incumbents lost the plot and how a modern, open, intelligent product keeps winning.

Why this seat

This is a vision seat with the keys to the engine. The base already works and the audience is already here. You decide what intelligence CruRank builds next, how it stays honest, and how it widens the gap the old guard can no longer close.

Apply for this role

Send a note and anything that shows your work to jobs@crurank.com. CruRank is BirkRidge LLC. We hire for judgment and ownership.