Taste is the ability to recognize quality and explain why. It's what separates a great piece of design from a mediocre one, a great piece of writing from a flat one, a great product from a forgettable one.
We teach AI models what great looks like in the subjective domains, starting with design. The whole company is built around the idea that quality in these areas is real, measurable, and worth investing in.
We hire people who care about craft. You don't have to be a designer. You do have to have strong opinions about quality in something, and be able to back them up.
01 · What you'd own
You're the DRI of data development projects. End to end. Scoping, expert staffing, quality routing, partner delivery, scope management, margin. The person who scopes the work delivers it. Ownership doesn't rotate.
You're the connective tissue between three groups that don't naturally talk to each other: the lab researcher who needs the data, the experts producing it, and the internal team building the infrastructure. Your job is to make all three feel like they're working on the same thing.
You'll pick up projects in scoping, in scale-up, and in compounding phases. Real portfolio. The playbook is maturing, not finished, so part of the job is building it as you run it.
02 · Day to day
03 · What you walk into
A team of SPLs already operating across multiple frontier lab partnerships. A maturing playbook on scoping, quality routing, and expert allocation. A curated expert community of 300+ vetted design experts. An internal team that has built real infrastructure and is building more. A pace that is high and an ambiguity level that is real.
We are actively holding back new project commitments until more of these seats are filled. Capacity is ahead of hiring. That's the honest reason for the urgency.
04 · What you get
Equity that matters. A seat at a company moving quickly toward a dreamy ARR. A real portfolio, not a single account. A team that takes care, taste, and craft seriously. In-person collaboration in SF or NYC. A taste stipend for museum visits, design courses, anything that sharpens the muscle.
05 · How the loop runs
Screen → CEO-level conversation → operating tempo and systems thinking → paid work trial (bounded, ambiguous, designed to expose how you actually work) → culture and commitment conversation with Thais or Matthew → references at the end.
Taste is building the taste layer for AI - teaching models what great feels like across subjective domains.
We're on a mission to end AI slop and help create a world with more taste. You'll work at the cutting edge of AI research with creative experts, shaping the future of how AI understands subjective quality and aesthetics.
Salary
$150,000 - $215,000
Equity
0.05% - 0.3%
Location
San Francisco, CA
Total raised
$18.5M
Last stage
Seed
Investors
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.