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About This Role
Overview
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Phia is looking for a Brand Intelligences \& AI Agents Manager to own and scale the brand relationships that power our commerce ecosystem.
You will manage thousands of brand partnerships across fashion, beauty, and home. Your job is to build the systems, automations, workflows, and communication infrastructure that allow Phia to manage brand relationships at scale.
You will negotiate commission rate increases, identify growth opportunities, surface the right brands for editorial moments, automate reporting, improve CRM hygiene, and create the operating system that helps our partnerships team move faster. You will work directly with our editorial, data, and partnerships teams to make sure the right brands are promoted to the right shoppers at the right time.
This role is ideal for someone who loves brands, commerce, and fashion, but also thinks like a systems builder. You should be the kind of person who sees a repetitive workflow and immediately asks, “How can I automate this?”
About Phia
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Phia has raised $43\.5M from Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins to build the AI alignment layer for commerce. In under a year, Phia’s consumer shopping agent has surpassed one million users and partnered with 9,600\+ retail brands, representing billions in annual gross merchandise volume. Each month, Phia drives millions of dollars in sales for brands and has achieved 9 figures in sales growth since launch.
In an era where AI vertical agents are reshaping every industry, commerce is on the verge of a complete transformation. Phia is reinventing shopping from a fragmented, impersonal experience into one that feels intelligent, trusted, and built around each user’s intent. This foundation of trust is our wedge to become the end\-to\-end shopping destination for the next generation of buyers.
Phia is a lean, high\-ownership team building at startup speed. If you want to ship quickly, own meaningful systems, and solve complex problems across consumer AI, commerce, and brand partnerships, this is the place to do it.
What You Own
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- Own and scale a portfolio of thousands of brand relationships across fashion, beauty, and home.
- Build the systems that make brand relationship management scalable, including automated reporting, CRM workflows, brand communication templates, performance dashboards, and follow\-up systems.
- Proactively negotiate commission rate increases with brand partners, using performance data and a clear point of view on the value Phia drives.
- Partner closely with editorial to identify which brands should be featured in key shopping moments, campaigns, and trend\-driven editorials.
- Translate brand priorities, commission rates, merchandising calendars, and performance data into clear internal recommendations.
- Build and maintain automations around brand performance tracking, relationship touchpoints, CRM hygiene, campaign sourcing, and partner follow\-up.
- Monitor brand performance and identify trends, risks, and opportunities before they become obvious.
- Source new brands and outbound campaign opportunities for the partnerships team.
- Help turn strong brand partners into long\-term Phia advocates by communicating clearly, moving quickly, and consistently creating value.
- Represent Phia to brand partners with confidence, warmth, urgency, and authority.
Qualifications
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- 1 to 5 years of experience in partnerships, revenue operations, affiliate, AI agents, account management, brand partnerships, e\-commerce, media, or a high\-growth startup.
- You are excited by the idea of managing thousands of relationships through systems, automation, and leverage.
- You are fluent with AI tools and automation platforms. You are comfortable using tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Zapier, Make, Airtable, HubSpot, Notion, Google Sheets, or similar platforms to automate repetitive work and improve team workflows.
- You are a strong negotiator. You are comfortable asking for more, backing it up with data, and making a clear case for why Phia deserves better economics.
- You are operationally sharp. You care about clean systems, accurate data, clear follow\-ups, and processes that actually work.
- You have high agency. When you see a broken process, you fix it instead of waiting for someone else to notice.
- You move fast, communicate clearly, and can operate without hand\-holding.
- You are comfortable working cross\-functionally with editorial, data, partnerships, and leadership.
- You are genuinely excited about fashion, beauty, commerce, and the future of AI\-powered shopping.
- You are NYC\-based or willing to relocate, and excited to work in\-office with a high\-velocity team.
Compensation Range: $80K \- $160K
Salary Context
This $80K-$160K range is in the lower quartile for AI Agent Developer roles in our dataset (median: $192K across 41 roles with salary data).
View full AI Agent Developer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI Agent Developers build autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and take actions. They design multi-step workflows, tool-use frameworks, and orchestration layers that let LLMs interact with external systems. This is the frontier of applied AI engineering.
Agent development is where the most interesting (and hardest) problems in applied AI live right now. Making an LLM answer a question is straightforward. Making it reliably execute a 15-step workflow that involves calling APIs, reading databases, making decisions, and recovering from errors is an unsolved problem. You're building systems that have to work despite the fact that the underlying model is non-deterministic.
Across the 3,823 AI roles we're tracking, AI Agent Developer positions make up 1% of the market. At PHIA, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week includes: designing the action space and tool definitions for a new agent use case, debugging why the agent chose the wrong action sequence on a specific input, building evaluation frameworks that test agent reliability across hundreds of scenarios, optimizing the prompt chain for cost and latency, and implementing safety guardrails to prevent the agent from taking destructive actions. The work is equal parts engineering and empirical science.
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
Skills Required
Deep experience with LLM APIs and agent frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen). Strong understanding of prompt engineering, function calling, and error handling for non-deterministic systems. Python is standard. Experience with orchestration patterns, state management, and workflow engines adds significant value.
The best agent developers think like systems engineers. They design for failure modes, build observability into every step, and understand that agent reliability is the product. Expertise in evaluation methodology for non-deterministic systems is the differentiator. Can you measure whether your agent works 'well enough'? Can you find the edge cases where it breaks?
Look for roles that describe specific agent use cases, mention evaluation methodology, and talk about production deployment. Early-stage companies exploring agents can be exciting, but be prepared for ambiguity. The most valuable roles are at companies that have already shipped a v1 and need to make it reliable.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI Agent Developer roles pay a median of $245,040 based on 106 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $165,000. This role's midpoint ($120K) sits 51% below the category median. Disclosed range: $80K to $160K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($275,000) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,880; Mid: $165,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $247,800; VP: $250,000.
PHIA AI Hiring
PHIA has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI Agent Developer. Based in New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $160K - $160K.
Location Context
AI roles in New York pay a median of $211,000 across 2,643 tracked positions. That's 5% above the national median.
Career Path
Common paths into AI Agent Developer roles include Software Engineer, LLM Engineer, Prompt Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward AI Architect, Principal Engineer, Head of AI Engineering.
Build agents. That's the portfolio. Take an open-source agent framework, build something that completes a non-trivial multi-step task, evaluate it rigorously, and document what you learned about reliability, cost, and failure modes. The field is new enough that practical experience counts for more than credentials.
What to Expect in Interviews
Interviews focus on systems thinking and reliability engineering. Expect questions about agent architecture: how you'd design a multi-step workflow with error recovery, how you'd evaluate agent performance, and how you'd prevent agents from taking destructive actions. Coding exercises often involve building a simple agent with tool use and evaluating its behavior across different scenarios. Discussion of safety and guardrails is increasingly common.
When evaluating opportunities: Look for roles that describe specific agent use cases, mention evaluation methodology, and talk about production deployment. Early-stage companies exploring agents can be exciting, but be prepared for ambiguity. The most valuable roles are at companies that have already shipped a v1 and need to make it reliable.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,823 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 112 entry-level, 1,798 mid-level, 1,516 senior, and 397 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (590 positions). The remaining 3,217 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($275,000 median, 41 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 55 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 434 roles).
AI Agent Developer is one of the newest and fastest-growing AI role categories. The market is early but accelerating as companies move beyond simple chatbots toward AI systems that can take real actions. Compensation is high because the skill set is rare and the business impact is potentially enormous.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,823 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,629), Data Scientist (322), AI Software Engineer (279). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (112) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,798) and senior (1,516) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 397 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (590 positions), with 3,217 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $200,100. Top-quartile roles start at $253,500, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $275,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,979 postings), Aws (1,190 postings), Azure (899 postings), Rag (839 postings), Gcp (726 postings), Pytorch (595 postings), Prompt Engineering (595 postings), Claude (540 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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