AI Solutions Strategist

Location: San Francisco Bay Area or New York City, with frequent travel as needed

Format: In-office 4 days a week with flexibility for the occasional remote days

Compensation: $150,000–$200,000 annual base salary

Fricative Mission

Businesses make consequential decisions with an incomplete view of the world.

What to invest in. Which customers to pursue. Where a market is moving. What risk to take. What to do next.

Their own information is scattered across systems, spreadsheets, conversations, and people’s heads. Meanwhile, public filings, market activity, company announcements, and other outside signals may reveal that something important has changed. People spend enormous amounts of time piecing this together, but the reasoning behind the eventual decision often remains invisible.

Fricative is building toward a Decision Management System: a way to bring those signals together and help a team answer a practical question: What should we do, why, and why now? The answers have to be more than persuasive. People should be able to see where each claim came from, how the evidence fits together, what remains uncertain, and what would change the recommendation. We’re developing this with real clients and real decisions because this is a category that doesn’t have a playbook yet.

Fricative is a portfolio company of super{set}, a venture studio that conceives, funds and builds AI-native companies from formation through scale. We work alongside founders as operators, helping shape companies from day one.

The Role

There isn't an established AI Solutions playbook to follow. You'll help write it while doing the work. The best way to build this system is to stay close to the decisions our customers are actually trying to make. You'll get close to a client's business, learn which decisions matter, how they make them today, and what they can't currently see. You'll draw out what different people know, notice where their accounts conflict, and earn enough trust to get past the polished version of how things work.

You'll investigate relevant public sources, find signals worth paying attention to, and connect them with what the client knows internally. You'll use AI to gather, test, and synthesize evidence at a scale that would be difficult to manage manually.

You'll turn the work into something a system can actually do. That means breaking a messy problem into the right building blocks, deciding what each skill should and should not do, and stitching those skills into a workflow that produces a useful answer. You'll test the workflow against real examples, find where skills fail, overlap or contradict each other, and tighten the system until it works reliably. When something requires an integration or capability the system doesn't have, you'll know enough to surface the gap and work with engineers to close it.

Then you'll turn that work into something useful: a clear, sourced account of what is happening, a defensible recommendation, and a way for the team to act at the right time. You'll explain the reasoning to the people who will make, challenge, and carry out the decision. You'll test whether they understand and trust it, learn where the story or the system breaks down, and improve both.

Some days you'll be learning a new industry. Others, you'll be chasing a surprising signal back to its source. Another day, you may be building a prototype or sitting with a client to understand why a recommendation didn't lead to action. You are the person who can figure out what the room should be building and not the one who writes the most code in the room.

WHAT YOU’LL OWN

You'll help turn real customer problems into solutions and, ultimately, into a new kind of Decision Management System:

• Understand the decision. Get close to the customer, learn how they make the decision today, what they know, what they're missing, and what constraints shape the choice.
• Investigate and frame the problem. Find and assess relevant internal and external information. Distinguish signal from noise and fact from inference, and make the alternatives, uncertainties, and implications clear.
• Design and build the workflow. Break the problem into the right skills and building blocks. Decide what each skill does, what it should never touch, what needs to happen before it runs, and how skills should feed into one another. Run samples, find failures and edge cases, and improve the system until the pieces work together reliably. Flag missing integrations or capabilities for engineers to build.
• Put working ideas in front of users, explain the reasoning, and learn whether they understand, trust, and act on them.
• Turn what works into a repeatable product and method for the next decision.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

In the first 6–9 months, you will have:

• Earned the trust of customers as someone they rely on to work through ambiguous and consequential problems.
• Developed a repeatable way to move from an unclear decision to a clear, sourced account of what changed, what it means, what choices are available, and when to act.
• Used AI to investigate and build quickly, while maintaining a high bar for sources, evidence, reasoning, and reliability.
• Turned patterns across customer work into repeatable product capabilities and a clearer playbook for what Fricative builds next.

WHAT YOU BRING

This is an unusual combination of strengths. The center of gravity isn't any one discipline.

• A strong GTM person knows how to listen to a customer.
• A strong engineer knows how to turn an idea into a working system.
• A strong researcher knows how to interrogate evidence.
• A strong strategist knows how to frame a difficult problem.

We need someone who can connect those modes of thinking: moving between customer, evidence, technology, and action while keeping sight of the decision. Someone who can explore divergently, then impose useful structure.

Must Have

• Experience taking an unclear business or customer problem, asking the right questions, and figuring out what actually needs to be solved.
• Ability to investigate across multiple sources, assess source quality, distinguish fact from inference, identify conflicting evidence, and explain what would change your conclusion.
• Experience working directly with customers or users to understand how they work, uncover needs that aren't obvious from the initial request, and turn those insights into action.
• Ability to think clearly and communicate clearly: separate what you know from what you believe, recognize uncertainty, challenge assumptions, change your view when the evidence changes, and explain complex work to different audiences.
• Enough technical understanding to work effectively with engineers and get hands-on with tools, data, APIs, automation, or AI without needing to be an engineer by training.
• Demonstrated use of AI tools to investigate, analyze, synthesize, prototype, automate, or solve a real problem. We care about what you've done with AI, not whether you've listed AI as a skill.
• Experience turning an idea, hypothesis, or insight into something tangible, testing it with real users, and learning from what happens.

Nice to Have

A non-linear background that doesn't fit neatly into one discipline. Maybe you've worked in consulting, research, journalism, analytics, operations, product, or a technical customer-facing role. Maybe you've built something on your own.

What matters more than the label is the pattern: you found a problem, investigated it, formed a view, built or tested something, changed your mind when the evidence changed, and made the result useful to someone else. You've probably experienced one or more of these:

• Work in financial institutions or other information-intensive enterprises.
• Complex or high-stakes business decisions.
• Working across internal data and external or public information sources.
• Using AI to change a research, analysis, or customer workflow.
• Working with APIs, data, software systems, automation, or technical products.
• Translating customer problems into product or technical requirements.
• Working in an early-stage company or another environment without an established playbook.
• Building something that moved from a one-off solution to a repeatable product, workflow, or method.

We want to see examples where you: Found the real problem. Investigated it. Formed a view. Built or recommended something. Tested it. Changed your opinion. Made the result useful to someone else.

Compensation

USD 150,000 - USD 200,000 annual base salary. The final offer will depend on qualifications, experience and location. This role is also eligible for equity.

The Opportunity

• Build a category around a new kind of system for managing how organizations make consequential decisions.
• Work directly with customers and the people building Fricative, using real decisions and real problems to shape what the product becomes.
• Partner directly with builders and operators who have repeatedly conceived, built and scaled category-defining infrastructure companies, learning from their pattern recognition while shaping Fricative alongside them.
• Shape the product and company from an early stage, with the autonomy to follow a problem wherever it leads and the support of a venture studio built to conceive, fund, and build AI-native companies.

If you've ever found yourself looking at a messy problem and thinking, “There has to be a better way to figure this out.” Let's talk.