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Key details
Why this role is notable
A DevOps infrastructure company is paying a senior person to live inside the San Francisco AI scene as an intelligence-gathering peer reporting to its CTO, signaling that JFrog is treating AI startups and emerging agent and model tooling as a market it must track and possibly acquire or build for, rather than just a feature set to add.
Job Description
At JFrog, we are reinventing DevOps to help the world’s greatest companies innovate. Thousands of customers, including the majority of the Fortune 100, trust JFrog to manage, accelerate, and secure their software delivery through our concept of "liquid software". This is a special place where your career can take off if you enjoy working with brilliant, spirited people on an important global mission.
A Different Kind of Forward Deployed AI Strategist - you will be embedded directly into the San Francisco AI ecosystem. Modeled after elite archetype roles at OpenAI and Anthropic, your "customer" is the entire SF AI community, and your ultimate deliverable is intelligence.
This is a high-trust role, as you will work directly under the CTO. You will represent JFrog as a peer, not a pitch. Everything you learn about emerging tools, working patterns, and enterprise pain points will directly shape our product, strategy, and roadmap.
What you'll do
- Market Intelligence & Ecosystem Scouting: Embedded within the Bay Area AI ecosystem (meetups, hackathons, conferences), and build a structured view of emerging, enterprise-ready, or overhyped AI vendors and startups to map enterprise-ready vendors and deliver actionable signal briefs to executive stakeholders.
- Trend Assessment & Product Strategy: Track emerging AI tools, frameworks, and architectural patterns ahead of mainstream adoption to anticipate critical shifts and inform the product roadmap.
- Community Relationship Management: Cultivate authentic, peer-to-peer relationships with AI enthusiasts, founders, and enterprise practitioners, building credibility, and a strong reputation within local AI and developer communities
- Product Insight & Opportunity Discovery: Continuously uncover actionable product insights and strategic opportunities by mapping active builders, emerging workflows, and problem-solving trends through a living, evolving knowledge base.
- Hands-On Prototyping & Assessment: Validate new APIs, tools, and agentic frameworks firsthand through active prototyping to produce concise technical evaluations detailing true utility, limitations, and strategic relevance.
- Credible Technical Leadership: Partner deeply with technical stakeholders by driving high-level discourse on LLMs, RAG architectures, fine-tuning, training and agentic infrastructure to guide product direction.
- Cross-Functional Synergy & Roadmap Alignment: Serve as the connective tissue between the external AI ecosystem and JFrog’s internal teams, partnering with Product, Engineering, and GTM to refine platform roadmap and competitive positioning.
- Internal Knowledge Amplification: Drive organizational alignment by leading regular technical briefing sessions on emerging AI trends.
What you'll bring
- Technical Depth & Product Acumen: 7+ years in a technical or product engineering role (FDE, Field Engineering, DevRel, or ML) with firsthand experience building with LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agentic frameworks.
- Established SF AI Network & Presence: Deeply embedded in the San Francisco AI ecosystem with an active network and a public technical footprint (e.g., blog, Substack newsletter, X-feed, or open-source contributions).
- Strategic Synthesis & Inbound-First Mindset: An empathetic, inbound-first listener skilled at distilling chaotic, high-volume external ecosystem signals into clear, actionable insights.
- Rapid Prototyping & Architectural Judgment: Ability to instantly evaluate architectural tradeoffs and stress-test new developer tools to assess their true platform utility.
What JFrog offers you
- At JFrog, base salary is only one component of our compensation package.
- This position also includes an equity package of restricted stock units (RSU). In addition, JFrog employees are eligible to participate in our Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
- JFrog provides employees comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, vision, retirement, wellness and much more!
JFrog is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status or any other category protected by law.
