Chief AI Officer, CAIO C-Suite AI Strategy & Execution

Job Title: Chief AI Officer, CAIO C-Suite AI Strategy & Execution
Location: Remote (U.S. Based)
Salary: Full-Time | $250K $400K Base
Reports to: CEO
Job #: 7373

About the role

This is not a research position. The Chief AI Officer is responsible for translating AI capability into business outcomes owning the full AI strategy, building the team, governing risk, and delivering measurable ROI across the organization.

You sit at the executive table. You translate between technical teams and the board. You make the build vs. buy vs. partner decisions. You define what AI means for this company's competitive position and then you execute it.

1 in 4 companies now have a CAIO. The ones who hire right win market share. The ones who hire wrong spend two years on pilots that never scale.

Core mandate

AI strategy

Define the roadmap that moves AI from experiment to enterprise

Team building

Recruit, structure, and lead ML, AI Engineering, and MLOps orgs

Governance

Ethics, compliance, risk frameworks, and responsible deployment

ROI delivery

Turn AI initiatives into measurable revenue and efficiency gains

What you'll own

• Define and own the company-wide AI strategy priorities, timelines, investment levels, and success metrics
• Build and lead a high-performance AI organization spanning ML Engineering, AI Engineering, MLOps, and Data Science
• Translate board-level business objectives into executable AI initiatives with clear ownership and accountability
• Make build vs. buy vs. partner decisions on AI tooling, platforms, and models and defend those decisions with data
• Establish AI governance frameworks: model risk management, bias audits, explainability standards, and regulatory compliance
• Drive cross-functional AI adoption work with Product, Engineering, Sales, and Operations to embed AI into core workflows
• Define the AI talent strategy: hiring profiles, comp benchmarks, team structure, and capability development roadmap
• Own the AI budget allocate resources across infrastructure, tooling, talent, and vendor relationships
• Represent AI strategy to the board, investors, clients, and the public including earned media and thought leadership
• Monitor the competitive AI landscape and adjust strategy as model capabilities, regulation, and market dynamics shift
• Establish evaluation systems for AI initiatives: pilot criteria, scaling gates, kill criteria for underperforming projects

Required

• 10+ years in AI, ML, or data with 3+ in senior leadership
• Proven track record shipping AI products to production at scale
• Deep technical fluency enough to evaluate teams, vendors, and architecture without a translator
• Experience leading cross-functional AI initiatives across business units
• Demonstrated ability to build and scale technical teams
• P&L ownership or equivalent budget accountability
• Strong executive communication board-ready, investor-ready
• Experience with AI governance, ethics, or regulatory frameworks

Strong plus

• Experience as VP of AI, Head of ML, or equivalent at a scaling company
• Published research, patents, or recognized domain expertise
• Experience with LLM productionization and agentic systems at scale
• Hands-on background in MLOps, data infrastructure, or AI security
• Fractional CAIO experience across multiple organizations
• Experience navigating EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, or sector-specific AI regulation
• Board advisory or investor relationships in the AI ecosystem
• Experience in recruiting, HR tech, or B2B SaaS platforms

What this is not

• This is not a research role publication output is not the success metric
• This is not a vendor evaluation role we need someone who builds, not someone who demos tools
• This is not a consensus-building role you will make hard decisions, including killing projects and restructuring teams
• This is not a title without accountability you own outcomes, not presentations

Who succeeds here

• You think in systems and incentives you know why AI initiatives fail before they fail
• You have the technical depth to earn the respect of your engineers without micromanaging them
• You translate complexity into decisions not decks, not frameworks, decisions
• You hold integrity as a non-negotiable for your team, your models, and your data practices
• You know when to move fast and when governance is the competitive advantage
• You operate with high autonomy and higher accountability

Not for you? SherlockTalent offers a $1,000 referral bonus for successful placements into this role. Include your name in the Referral Source field on the application.