Head of Artificial Intelligence Visa Sponsorship Jobs in California
Head of artificial intelligence jobs in California sit at the center of the global AI industry, with major employers including Google, Meta, Apple, and OpenAI concentrated across the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego. California's depth of AI research institutions and venture-backed startups makes it the most active state for senior AI leadership hiring and visa sponsorship.
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Overview
Baker Tilly is a leading advisory, tax and assurance firm, providing clients with a genuine coast-to-coast and global advantage in major regions of the U.S. and in many of the world’s leading financial centers – New York, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston. Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP and Baker Tilly US, LLP (Baker Tilly) provide professional services through an alternative practice structure in accordance with the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct and applicable laws, regulations and professional standards. Baker Tilly US, LLP is a licensed independent CPA firm that provides attest services to its clients. Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP and its subsidiary entities provide tax and business advisory services to their clients. Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP and its subsidiary entities are not licensed CPA firms.
Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP and Baker Tilly US, LLP, trading as Baker Tilly, are independent members of Baker Tilly International, a worldwide network of independent accounting and business advisory firms in 141 territories, with 43,000 professionals and a combined worldwide revenue of $5.2 billion. Visit bakertilly.com or join the conversation on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
Please discuss the work location status with your Baker Tilly talent acquisition professional to understand the requirements for an opportunity you are exploring.
Baker Tilly is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability or protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected basis, in accordance with applicable federal, state or local law.
Any unsolicited resumes submitted through our website or to Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP, employee e-mail accounts are considered property of Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP, and are not subject to payment of agency fees. In order to be an authorized recruitment agency ("search firm") for Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP, there must be a formal written agreement in place and the agency must be invited, by Baker Tilly's Talent Attraction team, to submit candidates for review via our applicant tracking system.
Job Description
Baker Tilly is seeking a Head of AI Engineering to serve as the senior technical leader responsible for defining how the firm’s AI agents are designed, orchestrated, evaluated, and deployed. This role will establish the standards and patterns for task decomposition, orchestration, context and memory management, tool use, human-in-the-loop controls, and failure recovery that product teams will build from.
The Head of AI Engineering will own the evaluation harness and baselines used to guide iteration and inform release and acceptance decisions for both internally developed and third-party agents. This role will also own the Compass agents and agentic experiences end to end, including Ask Compass, the firm’s expert front door.
As the Agent Factory continues to grow, this leader will help build and mentor the team, establish engineering and design standards, and partner closely with internal teams and external experts to advance Baker Tilly’s agentic engineering capabilities. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role for someone who leads by building, participates directly in code and design reviews, and translates emerging agentic engineering practices into scalable, firm-owned standards.
Responsibilities
- Define and build agentic reference patterns, including task decomposition, orchestration, context engineering, memory management, tool use, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and failure containment and recovery.
- Maintain the agent pattern library and establish orchestration standards that product teams can consistently build from.
- Own the Compass agents and full-stack product experiences end to end, on the intelligence layer built by the Data & AI Platform team.
- Build and own the evaluation harness, baselines, and regression discipline used to drive iteration and inform release and acceptance decisions for internally developed and third-party agents.
- Establish evaluation and acceptance criteria in partnership with Product, Architecture, Platform & Production Engineering, Quality Engineering, and other key stakeholders.
- Partner with Platform & Production Engineering to enable evaluation capabilities to operate at scale in production.
- Lead the Agent Factory as it grows, setting a high standard for agent design, engineering quality, and full-stack product development.
- Conduct hands-on design and code reviews across product teams and mentor engineers in agentic engineering practices.
- Hire and develop full-stack, forward-deployed AI engineers who can build both agents and the applications in which they operate.
- Partner with expert agentic-engineering resources to absorb leading practices and translate them into Baker Tilly-owned standards, patterns, and runbooks.
- Direct third-party and partner engineers delivering solutions against Baker Tilly’s technical standards.
- Evaluate third-party and vendor agents against the firm’s established technical and evaluation standards.
- Partner with the Chief Architect to establish evaluation standards and promote proven patterns into the platform’s shared library.
- Collaborate closely with Data & AI Platform, Product, Design, Quality Engineering, Platform & Production Engineering, subject matter experts, and engineering teams in India.
- Engage in special projects and perform other duties as assigned.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience; advanced degree preferred.
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years building and deploying LLM-based or agentic systems in production.
- Staff- or principal-level engineering experience with demonstrated success personally designing and shipping production agent systems.
- Deep experience designing and building evaluation harnesses and using evaluation results, baselines, and regression testing to drive iteration and release decisions.
- Strong knowledge of the modern agentic technology stack, including orchestration frameworks, tool/function calling and MCP, retrieval using vector and graph approaches, and context and memory management.
- Experience with evaluation methodologies, including evaluation design, baselines, regression discipline, confidence frameworks, and LLM-as-judge patterns and limitations.
- Full-stack product engineering experience, including building the applications and user experiences in which agents operate.
- Experience designing human-in-the-loop workflows, checkpoints, review experiences, and failure-containment mechanisms.
- Strong hands-on software engineering skills with recent experience writing production-quality code in Python and/or TypeScript.
- Experience with observability and tracing for agentic systems.
- Experience directing third-party or partner engineers against established technical standards.
- Experience evaluating third-party technologies or vendor agents against internal technical and quality standards.
- Demonstrated ability to use AI and agentic development tools as a force multiplier in day-to-day engineering work.
- Strong ability to collaborate across engineering, product, design, platform, and business teams while translating emerging technical practices into repeatable standards.
- No certifications or licenses required.
The pay range for this position is $250,000 to $400,000. This range represents a good-faith and reasonable estimate of the compensation the firm expects to pay for this position at the time of posting. Actual compensation will depend on a variety of relevant factors, including an applicant’s skills, experience, qualifications, professional certifications, work arrangements, geographic location, and other business and organizational needs. It is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range, and compensation decisions depend on the facts and circumstances of each case. Baker Tilly offers a compensation and benefits package to eligible employees.
Head of Artificial Intelligence Job Roles in California
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Search Head of Artificial Intelligence Jobs in CaliforniaHead of Artificial Intelligence Jobs in California: Frequently Asked Questions
Which companies sponsor visas for head of artificial intelligence roles in California?
California's largest AI employers, including Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Amazon Web Services, have consistent H-1B visa and employment-based green card sponsorship histories for senior AI leadership roles. Beyond the technology giants, well-funded AI startups in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, such as Anthropic, Scale AI, and Waymo, also sponsor international candidates for head-level positions with the right credentials and experience.
Which visa types realistically fit head of artificial intelligence roles in California?
Head of artificial intelligence roles qualify as specialty occupations requiring at least a bachelor's degree in computer science, data science, or a directly related field, making H-1B the most common path. Candidates with an advanced degree may also pursue EB-2, while those with extraordinary ability or sustained national or international acclaim may qualify for an O-1A. Most California employers also support EB-3 and PERM labor certification for long-term green card sponsorship. TN visa does not cover this role.
Which cities in California have the most head of artificial intelligence sponsorship jobs?
San Francisco and the broader Bay Area, including San Jose, Palo Alto, and Mountain View, account for the highest concentration of head of artificial intelligence positions in California, driven by the density of large tech companies and AI-focused startups. Los Angeles is a growing second hub, particularly in AI applied to media, healthcare, and autonomous vehicles, while San Diego sees demand from biotech and defense-adjacent AI research organizations.
How to find head of artificial intelligence visa sponsorship jobs in California?
Migrate Mate lists head of artificial intelligence roles at California employers with verified visa sponsorship history, letting you focus your search on companies that have actively filed for senior AI positions. Because sponsorship for leadership-level AI roles depends heavily on the employer's internal immigration program and the seniority of the hire, searching a curated platform like Migrate Mate helps you identify active sponsors rather than applying broadly and asking about sponsorship late in the process.
Are there any California-specific considerations for international candidates pursuing head of artificial intelligence roles?
California's AI hiring is heavily influenced by proximity to Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Caltech, which feed strong research talent pipelines and shape what employers expect from senior AI leaders. Many California employers are experienced H-1B sponsors, but head-level roles often involve equity compensation structures and long hiring timelines that can intersect with visa status transitions. Candidates already in F-1 OPT or H-1B status should work with their employer's immigration counsel to plan the transition carefully for director or VP-level AI appointments.
What is the prevailing wage for sponsored head of artificial intelligence jobs in California?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.