Strategy Lead, AI- Operations/MedOps in New York, New York at Petfolk Inc.

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 Strategy Lead, AI 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 Leaders 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 with ML / Data Foundation . You have personally built AI applications end-to-end. Not vendor-managed deployments, not Claude Code wrappers alone, not slide decks for engineering teams. You have fluency in Python, SQL, and the data-platform layer underneath (data warehouses, pipelines, modeling). Depth beyond workflow automation tools matters. Candidates whose AI building is primarily Claude Code or Claude API wrappers without underlying data/ML foundation are not the target profile. You should be able to walk through model selection, retrieval design, eval harnesses, and failure modes — not just prompts.

• LLM Application Fluency. You have built custom RAG implementations, designed evaluation harnesses (not just "I tested it"), and shipped agentic workflows with human-in-the-loop guardrails. You know when to use Claude vs. OpenAI vs. open models and why. You have built or extended MCP servers for your own tooling, or have equivalent evidence of working below the application layer.

• 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 design experiments (A/B tests, geo holdouts, lift measurement), work in SQL against data warehouses, build measurement infrastructure, and make decisions from evidence. You think in cohorts, segments, and funnels. You can distinguish correlation from causation under pressure, and you know how to prove that something you built actually worked. This is a Strategy Lead altitude expectation, not an analyst-level one. The bar is: can you set up the measurement framework for your function, not just query against someone else’s.

• 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.
• Product Development Mindset. You ship products, not just automations. You identify user problems, scope features with trade-offs, measure adoption, and iterate based on evidence. You know what good discovery, prioritization, roadmap management, and release discipline look like — and you can apply them to internal operator-facing tools, not just customer-facing products.
• Integration Fluency. You can connect LLMs and automation to live company EHR / practice-management systems, CRM, data warehouse, operational databases, communication tools, scheduling systems. API-first thinking. Permissions, auth, and audit trails are not afterthoughts.
• Service Operations Fluency. You understand what runs a service business: utilization, scheduling, supply chain, customer experience, workforce planning. You have worked in or built for a service business — ideally multi-location.

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.

Compensation:

$150,000 to $180,000 Annual Base

Apply with a portfolio of things you've built.

What you've built matters more to us