Director, Engineering - AI at Sprout Social

Description

Sprout Social is looking to hire a Director, Engineering - Artificial Intelligence to join our engineering team. This leader will report to the 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 that span mobile, front-end, back-end, QA and site reliability engineering—our team is a place to sharpen your craft and solve hard problems with the smartest people in the industry. You’ll get to work at a “tech-giant” scale, steering our engineering teams to make an impact on our company and our customers. As a leader of a dynamic, cross-functional team of engineers, data scientists, product managers, you will not only drive the architecture, design, and roadmap of your team, but also inform how our products and services interconnect. Join other empathetic leaders on our Engineering Leadership team who help each other grow and learn while we support and guide our teams to deliver 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, well-motivated teams of data 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 data 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 data scientists and engineers by example with effective feedback, coaching, and career development.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for a collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivating Data Science 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 developing and supporting AI products  in a production environment
• 5+ years of experience managing and leading data science  teams
• Technical expertise in modern AI technologies and designing, implementing, and maintaining AI models and platforms

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• Demonstrated experience developing and scaling high-performance teams through hiring and coaching of engineering leaders, data scientists and ML engineers
• 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, and serve machine learning models 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
• Diving into our products to learn about what makes our software unique and why customers love our products
• Beginning to understand the capabilities and limitations of our AI team, solutions and ML platform
• Establishing relationships with other engineering, product and design leaders and identify areas of opportunity
• Deploy code to production in order to understand the data science  environment, build tools, and deployment mechanisms.
• Learn Sprout's management practices and tools.

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

• Participate in architectural discussions and decisions, asking the right questions to guide your team to successful outcomes
• Assuming management of the AI team's engineering leaders. Meet with them regularly and provide 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
• Build relationships with our infrastructure, product, and support teams and identify ways your teams can be more proactive and effective.
• Identify opportunities for improvement in the team structure, rituals, partnership with product and design. Implement some low hanging fruits, create a plan for the others. 

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

• Guide and proactively evaluate your team execution on a major feature launch.
• Understanding the business goals and help the team proactively focus on the right problems while balancing technical debt, bugs, and product features.
• 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
• Measuring initial process improvements and make adjustments where appropriate
• Sharing best practices across the Engineering organization and help others grow from your experiences
• Meeting agreed-upon goals and success metrics relating to health of the technology and team productivity
• 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
• Helping to hone the engineering processes across your teams teams
• Obtaining (solicited and unsolicited) and acting upon peer, customer, and leadership feedback
• 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. Our benefits program includes:

• Insurance and benefit options that are built for both individuals and families
• Progressive policies to support work/life balance, like our flexible paid time off and parental leave program 
• High-quality and well-maintained equipment—your computer will never prevent you from doing your best
• Wellness initiatives to ensure both health and mental well-being of our team
• Ongoing education and development opportunities via our Grow@Sprout program, employee-led diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and mentorship programs for aspiring leaders
• Growing corporate social responsibility program that is driven by the involvement and passion of our team members

Candidates for this remote work opportunity must be based in either British Columbia or Ontario. If you are based in another location within Canada, we aren’t able to hire in your location at this time; however, if you’d like to stay in touch with us in case that changes in the future, please apply and we’ll save your application for possible future consideration.

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