Senior Applied AI/ML Scientist

Description

Sprout Social is looking for a Senior Applied AI/ML Scientist to join its AI, Data, and Intelligence Business Unit.

Why join Sprout Social’s Data Science and AI team? 

Sprout Social empowers businesses worldwide to harness the immense power and opportunity of social media in today’s digital-first world. Processing over one billion social messages daily, our platform serves up essential insights and actionable information to over 30,000 brands, informing strategic decisions that drive business growth and innovation, and fostering deeper, authentic connections to their end customers. Our full suite of social media management solutions includes comprehensive publishing and engagement functionality, customer care solutions, influencer marketing, connected workflows, and business intelligence. We're actively working to intuitively weave AI throughout our products as well as  applying them internally to drive our business’s growth trajectory.

What you’ll do

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of customer-centric features that leverage data science, machine learning (ML) and generative AI technologies. 
• Deliver tangible, quantifiable, and measurable impact on Sprout Social’s highest priority AI initiatives, directly benefitting our customers and driving key business outcomes.
• Develop robust frameworks for evaluation and measurement of AI features to increase speed, improve quality, and provide demonstrable ROI of product enhancements. 
• Collaborate closely with product management, design, and software engineering partners to deliver high quality AI solutions quickly and confidently.
• Effectively communicate AI capabilities, limitations, and product implications, ensuring alignment between technical possibilities, customer needs, and product vision.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for an experienced and highly technical AI/ML scientist who embraces challenges, practices a growth mindset, and is eager to collaborate with a variety of stakeholders to provide data-driven solutions to business leaders and to Sprout Social’s customers. If you excel at experimenting with and implementing AI/ML techniques, continuously improving capabilities, and driving innovation with a clear focus on customer value, we’d love to talk with you! 

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• A track record of leading customer-centric development of AI/ML solutions that resulted in quantifiable business impact. 
• 5+ years of applied experience in AI/ML and data science, working with technical and non-technical stakeholders to drive impactful solutions.
• 5+ years of experience developing models in Python using ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow, XGBoost, LGBM, NumPy, pandas) and strong proficiency in SQL and RESTful APIs for querying, transforming, and analyzing large datasets to drive product vision.
• Broad and deep expertise in analytical, statistical, and AI/ML methods, with a focus on shipping solutions that drive significant product improvement, resolve customer pain points, and demonstrably enhance user experiences. 
• Experience building with transformer architectures and leveraging embeddings.

Preferred qualifications for this role include experience:

• Rapidly prototyping with new, cutting-edge AI/ML technologies to explore their applicability and potential for business impact.
• Collaborating with / influencing product management to define, refine, and prioritize data-driven product roadmaps based on technical feasibility and customer value.
• Designing and executing A/B testing frameworks and other rigorous experimentation techniques to measure impact.
• Developing and deploying deep learning models.
• Developing and deploying NLP solutions. 
• Architecting and implementing production large language model driven features, including evaluating, fine-tuning, optimizing performance, and prompt-engineering to enhance customer journeys. 
• Building and deploying models on OpenSearch and ElasticSearch.
• Java development experience.
• Engineering model services, deployment technologies, and ML-Ops practices.
• Creating APIs and services across platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenAI, and Anthropic. 
• Enforcing AI/ML model security, bias mitigation, and ethical AI/ML frameworks.

How you’ll grow

Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including:

• Complete Sprout’s New Hire training program alongside other new Sprout team members.
• Meet and learn from assigned onboarding resources.
• Become familiar with our existing features, available data, and best practices.
• Begin meeting with various stakeholders to understand existing problem spaces and customer needs.
• Work with your manager to define the first project you’ll make an impact with.

Within 3 months, you’ll start hitting your stride by:

• Delivering your first AI/ML related feature(s) or process improvement(s). 
• Continue learning about Sprout’s products, customers, and business structure to suggest new features that will increase customer value delivery. 

Within 6 months, you’ll be making a clear impact through:

• Demonstrating technical ownership of an AI/ML initiative.
• Contributing to our longer-term roadmap of AI at Sprout. 
• Refining best practices and guide strategy for our AI/ML feature development process.

Within 12 months, you’ll make this role your own by:

• Continuing to develop impactful AI/ML solutions.
• Identifying new opportunities for AI/ML capabilities.
• Continuing to build relationships with business unit leaders, stakeholders, and executives.
• Contributing to elevating the technical excellence of the team and AI/ML best practices at Sprout.
• Expanding your skills by learning from the team and staying current with industry trends and state of the art  research.
• Surprise us! Use your unique ideas and abilities to change your team in beneficial ways that we haven’t even considered yet.

Of course what is outlined above is the ideal timeline, but things may shift based on business needs and other projects and tasks could be added at the discretion of your manager.

Our Benefits Program
We’re proud to regularly be recognized for our team, product, and culture. We invest in our team with a comprehensive, competitive benefits program:

• 100% Employer-Paid Health Benefits: We cover 100% of the premiums for you and your eligible dependents, including comprehensive medical, dental (basic & major), vision, life insurance, and disability.
• Generous Paid Time Off: 25 days of vacation annually, plus 5 paid sick days, all public holidays, and additional company-wide Rest & Recharge days.
• Premium Mental Health Support: Full, free access to Modern Health for you and your dependents, including coaching, therapy sessions, and digital wellness resources.
• Annual Lifestyle Stipend: A $950 CAD annual Lifestyle Spending Account to spend on your physical, mental, and financial well-being.
• Remote Work Support: A one-time $550 USD (equivalent) stipend to set up your home office, plus a monthly $50 USD (equivalent) stipend for internet.
• Personalized Financial Wellness: No-cost, confidential access to financial experts through Your Money Line to support your personal financial goals.
• Family & Care Support: Access to subsidized child and eldercare options through Care.com.
• Charitable Giving: A company match for your donations to eligible organizations.

*This list is for informational purposes only. Benefit offerings are discretionary and subject to change and do not constitute a contract or guarantee of benefits.

Individual base pay is based on various factors, including work location, relevant experience and skills, the responsibility of the role, and job duties/requirements. The base pay range for this role is $140,700 (min) - $195,690 (max) CAD annually. 

The listed ranges represent earning potential in this position. These ranges were determined by a market-based compensation approach; we used data from trusted third-party compensation sources to set equitable, consistent, and competitive ranges. We also evaluate compensation bi-annually, identify any changes in the market and make adjustments to our ranges and existing employee compensation as needed.

Base pay is only one element of an employee's total compensation at Sprout. Every Sprout team member has an opportunity to receive restricted stock units (RSUs) under Sprout’s equity plan. We have outlined the various components to an employee’s full compensation package here to help you to understand our total rewards package.

Candidates for this remote work opportunity must be based in either Alberta, British Columbia or Ontario. If you are based in another location within Canada, we aren’t able to hire in your location at this time.