Director, AI Transformation

About Us:

Rare Beauty Brands is a prestige skincare company with a portfolio that includes Kate Somerville, Patchology, and Good Day. We are growing fast, and our strategy is clear: acquire and build mid-sized premium skincare brands that serve discerning consumers, and run them better than anyone else could. AI is now central to how we plan to do that. Rare Beauty Brands is an equal opportunity employer.

The Role

Rare Beauty Brands is hiring a Director, AI Transformation to move the company from using AI tools to running on them. The role reports directly to the President & CEO and works across every function: brand, digital and ecommerce, marketing, supply chain, finance, and people.

Most companies, RBB included, have adopted AI at the individual level: people use it to write faster, summarize, and draft. The next stage is different. It means redesigning how work gets done, building agents and automations into real processes, and measuring the return. Getting there takes a dedicated owner with the technical range to build it and the business judgment to know what is worth building.

That is this job. You will sit with each department head, find the friction in how their teams operate today, and then design, build, and ship solutions that remove it. Some of that work you will do yourself. Some you will do with vendors, agencies, and the people already on the team. All of it has to show up in scalability, efficiency, profitability, or growth.

Responsibilities:

Find the work worth transforming

• Partner with each member of the executive leadership team to map current workflows, pain points, and sources of friction in their functions

• Build and maintain a prioritized pipeline of AI and automation opportunities, ranked by business impact, effort, and risk

• Say no to shiny projects with no ROI, and be able to explain why

Build and ship

• Design, prototype, and deploy AI agents, automations, and integrations across our systems (ERP, ecommerce platforms, Amazon, CRM and email marketing, data and reporting tools, and the tools we have not bought yet)

• Do hands-on work yourself where it is faster, and direct vendors, agencies, or internal builders where it is not

• Own the technical architecture: how our tools connect, where data lives, how agents get access, and what guardrails are in place

Make it stick

• Lead the change management side: training, documentation, adoption tracking, and partnering with teams to redesign processes in ways that ensure adoption

• Build internal capability so the company gets more self-sufficient over time, not more dependent on you

Govern it

• Own AI governance at RBB and chair a small AI governance group (CEO, select members of the Executive Leadership Team, HR) that approves policy and signs off on higher-risk deployments

• Update and maintain RBB’s AI policy: acceptable use, approved tools, what data can go into which systems, brand safety for anything customer-facing, and where a human has to review before anything ships

• Run an agent and tool registry. Every agent, automation, and AI tool in use has a named business owner, a documented purpose, the systems and data it can touch, its cost, and a review date. Nothing goes live unregistered

• Set guardrails for agents that take action: least-privilege access, limits on what they can spend or change, logging, and a fast way to shut them off, especially when they touch customers, money, or inventory

• Protect company and customer data: classify what is sensitive, control who and what can access it, and run a security and privacy review on every AI vendor before we sign (how they store, retain, and train on our data)

• Get ahead of shadow AI: know which tools people are actually using, bring the useful ones into approved channels, and retire the risky ones

• Own the response when an agent gets something wrong, exposes data, or behaves unexpectedly: how it is caught, fixed, and reported

• Track the privacy and AI regulations that apply to RBB and keep us compliant without slowing the work down

Measure and report

• Define the metrics for every major initiative before it starts (hours saved, cost avoided, revenue lifted, cycle time cut) and report against them

• Give the CEO and ELT a clear, regular read on what is working, what is not, and what is next, including where AI risk stands: what is in the registry, what has been reviewed, and any incidents

• Stay ahead of the AI curve, continually and rapidly identifying disruption opportunities and translating complex breakthroughs into lean, high-velocity execution plans for our company.

Requirements:

Must have

• 7+ years of experience spanning operations, technology, consulting, or product, with at least 2 years leading hands-on AI, automation, or digital transformation work that you built yourself, with specific, measurable results you can point to, such as hours saved, costs reduced, or revenue gained

• Hands-on fluency with current AI tools and the ability to build with them: LLM APIs and agent frameworks, automation platforms (Zapier, Make, n8n or similar), and enough scripting (Python or JavaScript) to connect systems and move data

• Working knowledge of AI governance and data security: access controls, data privacy, vendor security review, and how to put guardrails on an agent that can take real actions in real systems. You have written an AI or data policy that people actually followed

• A track record of changing how a team actually works, not just recommending it. You have redesigned a process, lived through the rollout, and can talk about what went wrong. You have experience bringing non-technical teams through a process change, with adoption you tracked after launch

• Business judgment. You can read a P&L, size an opportunity, and tell the difference between a demo and a solution

• You have the communication range to explain a technical architecture to an engineer and a business case to a CEO in the same afternoon

• You are comfortable operating in a lean, fast-moving company where you own outcomes end to end and there is no team under you on day one

Nice to have

• Experience in consumer products, beauty, or ecommerce, and familiarity with the systems that run them (Shopify, Amazon Seller Central, NetSuite or similar ERP, Klaviyo or similar)

• Experience evaluating and managing vendors, agencies, or freelance developers

• Background in data: building reporting, defining metrics, cleaning up messy sources

What success looks like in year one

By the end of your first 90 days, you have met with every department, documented the top friction points across the company, and brought the ELT a ranked roadmap with your first two or three builds already underway. You have also refined and published RBB’s AI use policy, stood up the AI governance group, and logged every AI tool and agent already in use in a central registry.

By six months, at least one process in each major function has been redesigned around an agent or automation, with a before-and-after measure the function head would vouch for. The company is tracking value creation across all projects using standardized metrics and a universally accessible dashboard. Every agent and automation in production is in the registry, has a named owner, and has passed a security and data review.

By twelve months, the company can point to transformational gains in cost, speed, and/or revenue tied to this work, the ELT treats you as the first call when a process problem comes up, and RBB has a repeatable way to evaluate, build, govern, and roll out AI solutions that does not depend on any one person.

How this role works

• Reports to the President & CEO and works day-to-day with the full executive leadership team

• Individual contributor to start. The role is expected to prove value with the tools we already have and build internal capability, rather than a large team or expense base

• Full-time and fully remote. RBB is a work-from-home company, and this role can be based in states where we are already registered: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington

• $130,000-$150,000 annual salary plus bonus potential

• 401(k) plus employer match, medical, dental, and vision benefits, paid time off, including company-wide self-care days

• Ownership over a growing function at a fast-moving, founder-led beauty brand incubator

• Salary Range Disclaimer - The salary range for this role reflects the minimum and maximum compensation for the role. Offers are typically made between the range minimum and the range midpoint. Actual compensation will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, and expertise, as evaluated during the interview process. Compensation may also vary based on where a role is performed