Director of Engineering, AI

Description

Sprout Social is looking to hire a Director, Engineering - Artificial Intelligence to join our engineering team. This leader will report to the Senior Vice President, Engineering. The key focus of this role is to help build and execute our platform-wide AI strategy. As a member of Sprout's Engineering leadership team, this leader will also facilitate strong collaboration across the engineering, product management and product design organizations.

Why join Sprout's Engineering team?

Sprout empowers businesses worldwide to harness the immense power and opportunity of social media in today's digital-first world. Processing over one billion social messages daily, our platform serves up essential insights and actionable information to over 30,000 brands, informing strategic decisions that drive business growth and innovation, and fostering deeper, authentic connections to their end customers. Our full suite of social media management solutions includes comprehensive publishing and engagement functionality, customer care solutions, influencer marketing, connected workflows, and business intelligence. We're actively working to intuitively weave AI throughout our products, enabling organizations to work smarter, unleash their creativity, and maximize the business impact of social media-that's where you come in!

With collaborative, cross-functional teams spanning front-end, back-end, applied science, and ML Ops, our team is a place to sharpen your craft and solve hard problems alongside some of the smartest people in the industry. As a Director of Engineering, you'll operate at "tech-giant" scale, leading engineers and technical leaders while partnering closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and other teams to shape strategy and deliver against a shared roadmap. You'll provide leadership across architecture, system design, engineering execution, and talent development, while helping define how our products, platforms, and services interconnect and scale. You'll also join an empathetic Engineering Leadership team committed to helping each other grow, raising the bar for engineering excellence, and supporting our teams in delivering world-class products.

What you'll do

• As a Director, you will be a key member of the AI leadership team and be responsible for building high-functioning teams of applied AI/ML scientists and engineers and steering them to iteratively deliver quality results.
• You'll lead the engineering team building foundational AI/ML products that will be used across our entire product suite and customer base.
• You will partner closely with the VP, Engineering and your leaders to chart the strategic growth of the current team, defining and building new teams and helping to steer architecture and product direction.
• Relying on your experience in building and maintaining highly scalable, reliable, distributed AI products and leading applied science teams, you'll lead teams to iteratively deliver quality software.
• You will guide the team through complicated product and technical roadmaps, and partner with product management and design to align on the strategy for your teams and support its execution.
• You'll grow your team of engineers and applied scientists by example with effective feedback, coaching, and career development.

What you'll bring

We're looking for a collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivating Engineering leader to help our AI team succeed and invest in the right capabilities to improve our customer experience and impact through AI and machine learning. If you confidently lead teams to solve hard problems, push them to learn from and teach each other, and work across functions and teams to get your teams to deliver, we'd love to talk with you!

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 7+ years of experience building and supporting products in a production environment
• 7+ years in software development, including several years leading teams and managing through leaders, with a track record of building sustainable, high-performing team structure.
• Experience leading engineering teams building AI/ML or agentic products, including partnering with or leading applied scientists and AI/ML engineers.
• Recent, direct experience (typically the last 2-3 years) leading or closely driving the development of modern AI products, agentic or LLM-based systems, evaluation and quality, built on foundation models. We care more about the depth and recency of your AI-product experience than the number of years.

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• Direct experience leading a mixed team of applied scientists and AI/ML engineers, and an understanding of how to lead research-inflected work, evaluation, model judgment, and quality, alongside product engineering.
• Demonstrated experience developing and scaling high-performance teams through hiring and coaching of engineering leaders, applied scientists, and AI/ML engineers
• Experience at a SaaS or product company that made a meaningful AI pivot or shift in product direction.
• Experience aligning a team's focus and vision towards the most impactful work across a complex product suite to meet the needs of a diverse, global customer base
• Track record of influencing and aligning stakeholders across different points of view or functions, to drive successful outcomes
• Experience developing enterprise-level distributed applications using Python, Java, distributed queuing systems, etc.
• Experience developing systems to deploy, manage, evaluate, and serve machine learning models and agentic products at scale
• Experience with generative AI, including open source and third party solutions (e.g., OpenAI)

How you'll grow

Within 1 month, you'll plant your roots, including:

• Experiencing Sprout's in-depth onboarding, covering everything from our company mission and values, hearing directly from executives and founders, to deep training on our products and the value that Sprout delivers to our customers
• Learning the current state of AI and machine learning at Sprout and future product and technical roadmaps
• Meeting your team in 1:1s to understand what's working, what's not, and gathering learnings to implement into your role
• Establishing relationships with other engineering, product and design leaders and identify areas of opportunity

Within 3 months, you'll start hitting your stride by:

• Participating in architectural discussions and decisions, bringing an informed industry perspective to ask the right questions and guide your team toward successful outcomes
• Assuming management of the AI team's engineering leaders. Meeting with them regularly and providing them with direct, constructive feedback on their work, as well as formulating career growth plans
• Participating in quarterly planning and roadmap processes and helping your team shape the technical roadmap for long-term success
• Getting acclimated to the hiring process and partner with your leaders to establish a staffing plan and process for the teams
• Helping your team and leaders improve processes and team rituals
• Building relationships with our infrastructure, product, go to market, legal, and support teams and identify ways your teams can be more proactive and effective.

Within 6 months, you'll be making a clear impact through:

• Guiding and proactively evaluating your team's execution on a major feature launch.
• Understanding the business goals and helping the team proactively focus on the right problems while balancing technical debt, bugs, and product features with measurable results
• Leading the performance review and career band calibration process for your team and coach your leaders through performance conversations with their direct reports
• Partnering with the VP, Engineering, product and design teams to evangelize our AI and ML technical and product vision with internal and external stakeholders
• Becoming an expert in our approach to AI and to confidently speak to ever-changing trends, new product features and platform enhancements to internal and external stakeholders

Within 12 months, you'll make this role your own by:

• Continue to develop your team, both personally and professionally, and having development plans in place for your team to hold them accountable
• Serving as Sprout's bridge to the broader AI/ML industry by staying current on emerging trends and technologies and proactively bringing that outside perspective into the team's strategy and roadmap
• Being recognized as a subject matter expert and leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning at Sprout
• Surprise us! Use your unique ideas and abilities to change our AI capabilities in Sprout in beneficial ways that we haven't even considered yet

Of course what is outlined above is the ideal timeline, but things may shift based on business needs and other projects and tasks could be added at the discretion of your manager.

Our Benefits Program

We're proud to regularly be recognized for our team, product, and culture. We invest in our team with a comprehensive, competitive benefits program:

• Comprehensive Health & Wellness: Premium BCBSIL medical, dental (high/low plans), and vision (Eyemed) insurance for you and your eligible dependents.
• Premium Mental Health Support: Full, free access to Modern Health for you and your dependents, including coaching, therapy sessions, and digital wellness resources.
• Retirement Savings: 401(k) plan with a 50% company match on your first 6% of contributions (a 3% total match).
• Financial Security: 100% employer-paid Life and Disability insurance for your peace of mind.
• Flexible Paid Time Off: A flexible PTO policy, supplemented with additional company-wide Rest & Recharge days throughout the year.
• Paid Parental Leave: Up to 16 weeks of paid leave for new parents to support you in expanding your family.
• Annual Lifestyle Stipend: A $1,000 USD annual Lifestyle Spending Account to spend on your physical, mental, and financial well-being.
• Work From Home Support: A one-time $550 USD stipend to set up your home office, plus a monthly $50 USD stipend for internet.
• Giving Back: 16 hours of paid volunteer time annually, plus a $100 annual match for your charitable donations.
• Additional Financial Perks: Access to pre-tax commuter benefits, subsidized child/eldercare (Care.com), discounted pet insurance (Figo), and no-cost personalized financial wellness support through Your Money Line.

*This list is for informational purposes only. Benefit offerings are discretionary and subject to change and do not constitute a contract or guarantee of benefits.

Whenever possible, Sprout wants to provide our team with the flexibility to work in the location that makes the most sense for them. Sprout maintains a remote workforce in many places in the United States. However, we are not set up in all states, so please look at the drop-down box in our application to see whether your state is listed. Few roles require an office setting. If your position requires a physical presence in a Sprout office, it will be evident in the job listing and your offer letter.

Our salary ranges reflect the expected earning potential for this role. Individual pay is based on geographic zone, relevant experience, and skills.

Our current hiring range for this role: $263,900 - $319,000annually. Offers are made within this range, with opportunities to grow within the broader band based on performance and impact.

We share both our current hiring range and our broader geographic salary bands to provide transparency into our compensation philosophy. This ensures you understand not only your starting potential but also the long-term growth potential available as you progress in your role.

We have two geographic pay zones in the United States:

Zone 1 (New York, California, Washington): $290,300 - $435,500

Zone 2 (All other US states): $263,900 - $395,900

These ranges were determined by a market-based compensation approach; we used data from trusted third-party compensation sources to set equitable, consistent, and competitive ranges. We also evaluate compensation bi-annually, identify any changes in the market and make adjustments to our ranges and existing employee compensation as needed.

Sprout Social is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate based on identity- race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex (including sexual identity), age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, veteran or military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, genetic information, sexual orientation, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, arrest record or expunged or sealed convictions, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law. Because Sprout Social is a federal contractor, we affirmatively recruit individuals with a disability and protected veterans. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in our latest DEI Report.

If you require a reasonable accommodation for any part of the interview process or to submit your application, please email us at accommodations@sproutsocial.com. Include the nature of your request and your preferred contact information. We'll do everything we can to support your success during our recruitment process while upholding your privacy. Please note that only inquiries regarding accommodations will receive a response from this email address; other inquiries will not be addressed (e.g., you send your resume but are not requesting an accommodation).

For more information about our commitment to equal employment opportunity, please click here (1) Equal Opportunity Employment Poster and (2) Sprout Social's Affirmative Action Statement.

Additionally, Sprout Social participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.

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