Recruit for and lead a team of applied researchers, setting the team’s culture and setting a high standard for quality and velocity
Act as the primary link between Research, Product, and Engineering. Oversee the development of experimental POCs to improve workflow efficiencies and ensure these innovations are successfully hardened and integrated into the platform
Collaborate with academic and industry-leading AI labs to define the data-centric techniques that will help power the next generation of foundation models
Anticipate the next bottlenecks in the AI data and pivot the team to develop programmatic solutions that address them
Partner with the Operations team to validate research-driven workflows in real-world production environments, ensuring they scale across diverse and complex domain-specific tasks

5+ years of experience in applied AI, research or machine learning roles, with at least 4+ years of experience managing technical teams
A player coach who is willing to be hands-on with coding, research, customer-facing engagements
A proven track record of thriving in fast-paced, ambiguous environments, comfortable managing competing priorities across cross-functional stakeholders in Product, Engineering, and GTM
Enjoys solving real-world problems in the data space and bridging research and production
Strong, practical experience working with LLMs, agentic workflow
Bonus: Experience with data annotation workflows and/or building internal tooling for them

Senior Director, Applied AI Research

Key skills