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 an AI Strategy Lead to own the deployment, launch, and ongoing optimization of conversational AI across Petfolk’s virtual care business. This person will sit inside the Virtual Care and Customer Service function and report directly to the VP of Medical Strategy and Development.

By the time you start, the conversational AI platform will already be selected and in deployment. Your first job is to get deeply fluent in the platform’s tooling, functionality, and every protocol driving customer interactions across phone, SMS, email, and chat. From there, you’ll own the launch, monitor performance against real success criteria, and iterate relentlessly — refining workflows, guardrails, escalation paths, and prompts until the system is genuinely excellent.

Over time, this role expands. You’ll take on broader ownership of virtual care analytics — interaction data, staffing patterns, service levels, handle times — and use that analysis to identify where AI can create more value and where more traditional operational changes are the better lever. You’ll build business cases, model ROI, and partner with Engineering, Brand, Operations, and Medical to put improvements in place.

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 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 virtual care team moves faster, customers get better service, and the AI systems you manage deliver measurable improvements in quality, efficiency, and scalability.

What You’ll Do

• Take full ownership of the conversational AI platform already in deployment — learn the tooling, functionality, and interaction protocols inside and out, then drive it through launch and beyond.
• Define and document use cases, success criteria, escalation rules, and guardrails for AI-enabled customer interactions across phone, SMS, email, and chat.
• Lead testing efforts in close partnership with operational, medical, engineering, brand, and vendor partners. Evaluate performance against defined quality, customer experience, and business success measures.
• Own the ongoing cycle of implementing, testing, evaluating, and iterating on AI-supported workflows. Refine prompts, logic, escalation paths, and guardrails to drive the best possible outcomes. Prioritized by business impact.
• Identify and prioritize additional use cases where AI can improve customer experience, quality, efficiency, or scalability — and sequence future deployments based on operational need, business value, and feasibility.
• Analyze customer interaction data, workflow trends, staffing patterns, service levels, and handle times to surface broader improvement opportunities across virtual care.
• Build business cases and economic analyses for both AI and non-AI initiatives, including expected impact on quality, customer satisfaction, efficiency, labor leverage, and return on investment.
• Establish reporting and review processes that provide clear visibility into performance across AI use cases. Define and monitor KPIs including adoption, containment, average handle time, CSAT, quality assurance scores, and implementation progress.
• Work cross-functionally with Engineering, Brand, Operations, Medical, and other stakeholders to drive alignment, establish clear ownership and timelines, and ensure accountability across initiatives.
• Over time, expand into broader ownership of virtual care analytics, workforce management modeling, and capacity planning to improve operational decision-making across the line of business.

Requirements

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.

Work Environment

NYC HQ (4 days per week in-office preferred).

This position requires minimal travel, up to 10%, to headquarters for in-person meetings and to pet care centers to familiarize yourself with operations and ensure timelines are met.

Compensation:

$150,000 to $200,000 Annual Base

Apply with a portfolio of things you've built.

What you've built matters more to us