Director, AI

iSpot•Bellevue, WA

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

At iSpot, we are transforming how brands, agencies, publishers, and platforms measure advertising outcomes across linear, streaming, and digital ecosystems. Artificial intelligence is a critical part of our product strategy and future growth. As Director of AI, you will lead the team that builds and ships iSpot's AI-powered capabilities across our Creative, Audience, and Outcomes (CAO) product lines. You will take AI concepts from prototype to production — intelligent creative analysis, audience insights, agentic workflows, and next-generation outcome measurement — and make them reliable, evaluated, and economical at scale. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and data science. You will partner closely with Product Management, Data Science, and Platform teams to sequence the work, resolve dependencies, and deliver AI features customers actually adopt. This is a hands-on leadership role. You will lead and grow a team, but we expect you to prototype, review architectures, write code, evaluate emerging models, and work directly alongside engineers to turn ideas into customer value.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field; advanced degree preferred.
10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading engineering teams.
Demonstrated experience shipping AI or machine learning capabilities into production products used by customers.
Working knowledge of modern AI technologies: large language models, agentic systems, retrieval architectures, embeddings, evaluation methods, and fine-tuning trade-offs.
Strong software engineering fundamentals — distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, testing, and production operations.
Genuinely hands-on: comfortable in the codebase, in notebooks, and in production traces.
Experience partnering across product management, data science, and platform engineering.
Clear communicator who can explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
Track record of delivering in fast-paced environments with shifting priorities.
Practical understanding of AI safety, data governance, privacy, and enterprise security requirements.

Nice To Haves

Experience within advertising technology, media measurement, marketing technology, or consumer insights platforms.
Experience building and operating agentic AI systems or autonomous workflows in production.
Familiarity with modern MLOps practices, LLM observability, and cloud-native AI platforms.
Experience with large-scale data processing and analytics infrastructure.
Experience working directly with enterprise customers to shape and validate AI capabilities.
MS or advanced technical degree preferred.

Responsibilities

Lead the day-to-day execution of iSpot's AI engineering roadmap across the Creative, Audience, and Outcomes (CAO) product portfolio.
Build, ship, and operate customer-facing AI capabilities — including generative AI features, agentic workflows, retrieval systems, and applied machine learning.
Own the architecture and technical patterns for AI services: model selection, orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, cost, and latency.
Prototype quickly and personally — write code, run experiments, and validate concepts before committing the team to a direction.
Hire, lead, and develop a team of AI and machine learning engineers, setting a high bar for engineering craft and delivery.
Partner with Product Management to turn opportunities into scoped, sequenced roadmaps with clear success criteria.
Partner with Data Science to productionize models and measurement methodology at scale.
Establish evaluation and experimentation frameworks that make AI quality measurable and regressions visible before customers see them.
Instrument and manage the economics of AI systems — inference cost, throughput, caching, and capacity planning.
Evaluate emerging models, tools, and vendors, and make pragmatic build-versus-buy recommendations.
Embed responsible AI practices, data governance, privacy, and security into every customer-facing solution.
Report progress, risks, and results clearly to engineering and executive leadership.