[Hiring] Models Czar @Venice.ai

Role Description

We're hiring a Models Czar to be the single owner of the model portfolio across all of Venice's products: selection, reliability, configuration, and lifecycle management. This is not an ML research role; Venice doesn’t train models. You will treat models as SKUs: making strategic calls about what to offer, how to position each one, and how to deliver the best experience across every Venice product.

Your stakeholders are Venice's external-facing products, and you are their central point of contact for a robust and reliable model lineup. You'll stay on top of the industry — which models are launching, which are highly anticipated, which excel at which use cases — and recommend internally what Venice should support. You are the single source of truth for everything the company needs to know about every model that exists and the owner of this internally-serving product.

This role works closely with product managers, engineering, marketing, and the leadership team. Your job is to ensure the models Venice offers are everything users could want — including the guidance and information they need to confidently choose the right model for the job.

What You’ll Do

• Own the model portfolio, end to end.
• Decide which models live on the platform — and which don't. Define tiering across free, Pro, Pro Plus, Max, and maintain the offerings matrix by product line (Chat, API, Studio).
• Build the models-as-product operating system.
• Establish launch processes including pre-release testing, configuration review, documentation, and launch communication.
• Define config standards, uptime SLAs, deprecation policies, and runbooks.
• Drive reliability.
• Define health standards for every model tier.
• Monitor uptime and fallback performance, triage incidents, lead post-mortems, and ensure load-bearing models have appropriate provider redundancy.
• Identify and scope new product offerings.
• Own models-as-a-product beyond the existing catalog: spotting opportunities where Venice should build or offer new model products.
• Be the expert on all our models.
• Continuously monitor our entire catalog against what providers are actually offering, and flag drift the moment it happens.
• Own model strategy for each product.
• Turn signals into roadmap.
• Work across the org, not in a silo.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in product management, ideally across infrastructure, dev tools, or AI/ML platforms.
• Real technical fluency.
• Ability to triage model and configuration issues before escalating to engineering.
• Understanding of model performance metrics and ability to dig deep into error root causes.
• Experience in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
• Comfortable with APIs, inference systems, observability data, evaluation tooling, and cross-functional launch processes.
• Alignment with the mission of uncensored model testing and privacy-first positioning.

Requirements

• Ability to reason about COGS and margin per inference request.
• Experience making cost/speed trade-off decisions with incomplete data.
• Experience making hard prioritization calls and defending them.