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 learning teams in a commercial software environment.
• Experience building or leading AI/ML platforms: (feature stores, model serving, training pipelines) in a Cloud Environment like AWS
• Deep Technical Acumen: Extensive practical experience with and deep theoretical understanding of machine learning algorithms, statistical modeling, and experimental design (A/B testing).
• NLP and LLM Proficiency (Critical): Demonstrated experience in applying, fine-tuning, and integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) and advanced Natural Language Processing techniques into production systems, especially for tasks related to text classification, summarization, and generation.
• Product Thinking: Exceptional ability to translate ambiguous or high-level product needs into concrete, defensible data science problems and solutions.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders (e.g., Executives, Product Managers, Marketing).
• Education: Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.

The base pay provided for this position ranges from CAD $224,000/ year - $336,000/ year depending on the geographic market and assuming a full-time schedule. Actual base pay is based on a number of factors including market location, job-related knowledge, education or training, skills, and experience.

Bonuses may also be offered as part of the total compensation package, in addition to a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance; RRSP matching; flexible spending & health savings account; paid holidays; paid time off; employee assistance program; and other company benefits. 

This opening is for an existing vacancy.

SurveyMonkey believes in-person collaboration is valuable for building relationships, fostering community, and enhancing our speed and execution in problem-solving and decision-making. As such, you will be required to work from our Ottawa office up to 1 day per week.

#LI-Hybrid

Why SurveyMonkey? We’re glad you asked

At SurveyMonkey, curiosity powers everything we do. We’re a global company where people from all backgrounds can make an impact, build meaningful connections, and grow their careers. Our teams work in a flexible, hybrid environment with thoughtfully designed offices and programs like the CHOICE Fund to help employees thrive in work and life.

We’ve been trusted by organizations for over 25 years, and we’re just getting started. Our milestones include celebrating a quarter-century of curiosity with 25 acts of giving, opening new hubs in Costa Rica and India, crossing the threshold of 100 billion questions answered, and earning recognition as one of the Most Inspiring Workplaces across North America and Asia.

We live our company values—like championing inclusion and making it happen—by embedding them into how we hire, collaborate, and grow. They help shape everything from our culture to our business decisions. Come join us and see where your curiosity can take you.

Our commitment to an inclusive workplace

SurveyMonkey is an equal opportunity employer committed to providing a workplace free from harassment and discrimination. We celebrate the unique differences of our employees because that is what drives curiosity, innovation, and the success of our business. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, pregnancy, parental status, genetic information, political affiliation, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Accommodations are available for applicants with disabilities.

Your data 

For more information on how SurveyMonkey (including its subsidiary and affiliated companies) processes your personal data as a job candidate or applicant, please see our Global Applicant and Candidate Data Privacy Notice. Please note that we may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as sourcing candidates, reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or summarizing interviews. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment.