Director of Engineering, AI

About this role

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…