Director of Applied Science and Engineering - Knowledge Graphs & AI

the team at the frontier of knowledge graph research. Foster connections with the academic community through conference participation, publications, and strategic academic partnerships. Our Vision Of You: PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related field with a focus on knowledge representation and reasoning, graph neural networks, information extraction, recommender systems or conversational AI and dialogue systems 10+ years of experience in applied science or machine learning, with at least 3 years in a people leadership role managing teams of 5+ applied scientists or research engineers. Demonstrated track record of building and shipping knowledge graph, NLP, or graph ML systems at production scale: not just publishing papers, but delivering measurable business outcomes. Deep expertise in at least three of: knowledge graph construction, entity resolution, information extraction, graph neural networks, temporal reasoning, representation learning, or recommender systems. Strong engineering fundamentals. You can write production-quality code, not just prototype notebooks. Proficiency in Python / Golang; and graph databases or query languages ( e.g. , Neo4j, SPARQL, Cypher) is required. Experience recruiting, developing, and retaining top applied science talent. You have grown ICs into senior technical leaders and built teams with a strong shipping culture. Executive communication skills. You can translate complex research concepts into business impact narratives for C-suite and board audiences. Comfort with deep ambiguity. You will define the problem space, not just solve well-scoped problems. You thrive when chartering new technical directions from scratch. Strong Ownership: Take end-to-end responsibility for research and model development initiatives, from problem formulation and data analysis through experimentation, production deployment, and ongoing performance monitoring, driving outcomes with minimal oversight.

Nice To Have: • Experience building multi-tenant knowledge graph systems with per-customer isolation and scale

requirements. • Background in sales, revenue, or B2B SaaS domains: understanding of deal cycles, pipeline management, and CRM data models. • Experience integrating knowledge graphs with LLM-based systems (RAG architectures, tool-augmented generation, agentic frameworks). • Strong communication skills with the ability to translate research concepts into product impact for cross-functional audiences. • Publications in top-tier venues (KDD, NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, WWW, SIGIR, etc. ) in knowledge graphs, NLP, or graph learning. • Experience with graph databases at scale (Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, or similar) including performance tuning, query optimization, and multi-region deployment. • Familiarity with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar agent-tool integration patterns. • Track record of building applied science teams from scratch (0→1 team formation).

Why Join Us? • Foundational Leadership: You will define how Outreach thinks about knowledge representation and contextual reasoning, decisions that shape the platform for years. This is not an optimization role; it is a charter-defining one. • Greenfield Architecture: Build the knowledge graph platform from the ground up with the latitude to make foundational technical decisions on schema design, graph infrastructure, and reasoning systems. • Scale & Impact: Outreach processes millions of sales interactions across 4,000+ enterprise customers. Your team's work will directly power agentic AI workflows that change how revenue teams operate globally. • Executive Visibility: Direct exposure to top leadership in the company. Present research direction and results at the executive level. • World-Class Team: Join a culture that values scientific rigor, engineering excellence, and intellectual honesty. Collaborate with senior engineers, product leaders, and data scientists who care deeply about getting it right. • Growth into executive level: For the right leader, this role is a path to executive level as the function scales. You will shape not just the technology but the organizational structure of applied science at Outreach. \n

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