Senior Director, AI Engineering

SurveyMonkey is the world’s most popular platform for surveys and forms, built for business—loved by users. We combine powerful capabilities with intuitive design, effectively serving every use case, from customer experience to employee engagement, market research to payment and registration forms. With built-in research expertise and AI-powered technology, it’s like having a team of expert researchers at your fingertips. Trusted by millions—from startups to Fortune 500 companies—SurveyMonkey helps teams gather insights and information that inspire better decisions, create experiences people love, and drive business growth. Discover how at surveymonkey.com . What we’re looking for This is a highly visible, strategic, and impactful role, reporting the VP of Engineering for SurveyMonkey Core Engineering. As the Senior Director of AI, you will be a critical leader in defining the future of SurveyMonkey's products and services. You will not just manage the Machine Learning and Data Science teams, but help drive the fundamental shift in how our customers gather, analyze, and act on feedback. This requires both strong strategic thinking, and solid experience building models and deploying AI/ML systems end-to-end (from data to production). The successful candidate will make a material contribution to the company's success by providing thought leadership around how to leverage AI technology in the SurveyMonkey product in an intuitive and natural way. What you’ll be working on Strategic Leadership & Product Alignment Strategic Roadmapping: Define and execute the long-term data science strategy, ensuring alignment with SurveyMonkey’s overarching business objectives and product vision. Product-to-Data Science Translation: Act as the primary liaison between Product Management and the Data Science team, expertly mapping ambitious SurveyMonkey product requirements (e.g., automated thematic analysis, predictive modeling, intelligent survey generation) into clear, technically feasible data science projects. AI-First Transformation: Support the charge in migrating SurveyMonkey from a traditional SaaS product to an AI-first platform, embedding advanced data science and LLM capabilities deeply within the product experience. Technical Expertise & Innovation LLM and NLP Integration: Drive the strategy for integrating and leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to enhance our text analytics, sentiment analysis, and generative features within the product. Familiarity with MLOps / LLMOps practices: Experience developing and deploying a Machine Learning Platform. Experience with Agentic AI Architecture, deployment and execution. Familiarity with modern MLOps tools and platforms (e.g., AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, MLflow). Technical Direction: Set the technical standards for model development, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance. Ensure the team utilizes best-in-class data science models, tools, and platforms for scalable production systems. Ownership of model lifecycle: experimentation → deployment → monitoring → iteration Stay Current: Actively research, evaluate, and evangelize the latest developments in machine learning, deep learning, MLOps, and data science methodologies, ensuring the team's capabilities remain cutting-edge. Team Management & Development Management and Motivation: Lead, mentor, and inspire a high-performing team of data scientists and machine learning engineers. Foster a culture of innovation, rigor, collaboration, and continuous learning. Recruitment and Growth: Recruit top-tier data science talent, manage performance, and define career progression paths to ensure the ongoing growth and retention of team members. We’d love to hear from people with Experience: 10+ years of progressive experience in data science, including significant experience with AI/ML platforms, and at least 5 years in a Director level leadership role managing and scaling data science or machine l