Strategy Lead, AI at Petfolk Inc. – New York, New York

About Petfolk

Petfolk is a veterinary care company founded by Dr. Audrey Wystrach. We run modern clinics, a 24/7 virtual care app, and a connected care model that pet parents actually love. Our NPS sits above 90. Newsweek put us in their top five Most Loved Workplaces globally. We've raised north of $116M from Deerfield Management, White Star Capital, Movendo Capital, and others.

The Opportunity

We’re hiring a Strategic Operations Lead to work inside one of our core business functions. This is not a role for someone who wants to observe or advise. It’s for someone who looks at how things are currently working, figures out what’s slowing it down, and fixes it.

You’ll work closely with the VP and team to understand how the function runs day to day — where time is wasted, where decisions get stuck, and where the current process doesn’t hold up as the business grows.

That might mean reworking a process, introducing a better way of doing something, or partnering with technical teams to put a more durable solution in place. Whatever you build needs to hold up in real use and make a clear difference.

You’ll own work end to end — from figuring out the problem to putting something in place and making sure it actually gets used.

Success in this role is simple: The team moves faster, works more efficiently, and gets better output because of what you put in place.

Must Have

• AI-Native Builder. You don't just use AI tools. You build systems with them. You've put together workflows, automated pipelines, or created AI-powered tools in a marketing or growth setting. You can show us what you've built and talk through why you made the choices you did.
• Claude and LLM Fluency. Real experience with Claude or comparable models. You get system prompt design, structured outputs, tool use, and evaluation loops. You treat prompts like code: you version them, test them, and improve them over time.
• Workflow Automation. You've built multi-step automated workflows in N8N, Make, Zapier, or something similar. You've connected APIs, handled conditional logic, and dealt with things breaking in production. The specific tool matters less than the experience.
• Analytical Rigor. You can set up experiments, read results honestly, and build systems that track what matters. A/B testing, attribution, and performance dashboards across paid channels.
• Semi-Technical Chops. Maybe you code, maybe you don't. Either way, you can read an API doc, write a script when you need to, debug an integration, and build with low-code tools without asking engineering for help.
• Self-Directed. Give you a goal and you'll find the path. You've worked in places where things moved fast, the roadmap was fuzzy, and you had to figure out what mattered most and go do it.

Strongly Preferred

• Agentic Systems Experience. You've built or prototyped agentic AI workflows where the system takes actions, calls tools, makes decisions, and routes work to a human when it should. Bonus points for Claude tool use or MCP experience.
• Custom MCP Development. You've built Model Context Protocol servers or integrations that plug LLMs into external tools and data sources.
• Background in top-tier consulting, banking, product, or high-growth startups
• AI Compliance Awareness. You pay attention to FTC guidelines and platform rules around AI-generated content in ads. As a pet health brand, trust matters a lot to us, so this is more important here than it might be elsewhere.
• Prompt Engineering Discipline. You keep prompt libraries, run evals, version your system prompts, and treat the craft seriously. Beyond being good at using an LLM, you're good at building reliable systems on top of one.

Why Petfolk

• Be part of a cohort of AI Leads building something new across the whole company.
• Full autonomy and real ownership, reporting directly to the functional VP
• A company that's genuinely investing in AI, not just talking about it.
• Work that connects to something real. Better marketing means more pet parents find better care for their animals.

Apply with a portfolio of things you've built.

What you've built matters more to us