VP-Distinguished Engineer of Generative AI Engineering

ABOUT SLATE

At Slate, we’re building safe, reliable vehicles that people can afford, personalize and love—and doing it here in the USA as part of our commitment to reindustrialization. The spirit of DIY and customization runs throughout every element of a Slate, because people should have control over how their trucks look, feel, and represent them.

WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR As the VP – Distinguished Engineer of Generative AI Engineering at Slate Automotive, you will be the founding architect of our GenAI capability. We are not just building an electric truck — we are building an AI-native company. You will design, build, and ship the Generative AI systems that transform how we engineer vehicles, run manufacturing, and serve customers. This is a deeply hands-on role: you will write code, make architectural calls, and lead by example.

You will build and lead a lean, high-leverage team of GenAI engineers, MLOps engineers, and applied scientists — and personally stay in the code — to solve challenges no one in the auto industry has cracked yet.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Build the GenAI Stack from Scratch: Architect and ship the end-to-end GenAI platform — context layer, data layer, model serving, agent frameworks, and evaluation pipelines — on a modern cloud foundation.
• Lead by Building: You are a player-coach. You will recruit and grow a world-class team of GenAI engineers, but you will stay in the code — reviewing PRs, making architecture calls, and shipping alongside your team.
• Ship Agentic Systems Across the Company: Deploy GenAI agents across vehicle engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, software development, and GTM — converting human-driven workflows into AI-driven ones that run faster and cheaper.
• Build Slate’s Proprietary AI Moat: Construct the Context Layer — a living knowledge base of agentic, human, robotic, and enterprise decisions — and the unified Data Layer that trains purpose-built models on real Slate decisions. This IP is our long-term competitive advantage.
• Drive GenAI into the Physical World: Take GenAI beyond the laptop — partner with Vehicle Engineering, Manufacturing, and Quality teams to embed AI into the factory floor, design tooling, and supply chain, upgrading traditional auto manufacturing from the inside.
• Set the Standard for AI-First Engineering: Establish the engineering culture, standards, and practices that make Slate a destination for world-class AI talent — and that make our GenAI output measurably better than the industry.

WHAT YOU BRING

• 12+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years building and shipping production GenAI systems (LLM-based applications, agents, RAG pipelines), with 5+ years in a senior technical leadership capacity.
• GenAI Architecture: Deep hands-on experience with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini), open-source model deployment, vector databases, agent orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar), and prompt engineering at scale.
• MLOps & Production Systems: Proven track record taking GenAI from prototype to production — including evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, and continuous improvement loops.
• Fine-Tuning & Custom Models: Experience fine-tuning and training purpose-built models for domain-specific tasks. Familiarity with the tradeoffs between hosted APIs, open-source models, and custom training for cost, latency, and IP reasons.
• Data & Cloud Foundation: Solid grounding in modern data stacks (Snowflake, Databricks, dbt) and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure). Comfortable reasoning about cost, latency, and data architecture as first-class constraints.
• Academic Grounding: BS required; MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field preferred — but exceptional track record beats pedigree every time.