Director of AI Engineering

Apollo.io is the AI-native GTM platform used by millions of professionals worldwide helping revenue teams automate workflows personalize outreach and convert prospects into customers. Backed by Sequoia and Bain Capital and valued at $1.6B+ Apollo is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the world shipping AI-first capabilities across assistants agentic automation search and generation at massive scale.

We are entering a hyper-growth phase of AI innovation and are hiring a Director of AI Engineering to lead the strategy engineering execution and cross-functional integration of Apollo’s applied AI systems.

Your Role & Mission

As the Director of AI Engineering you will own the end-to-end delivery of Apollo’s AI roadmap spanning autonomous agentic systems LLM-powered workflows search & relevance personalization and production-grade ML infrastructure. You will lead and scale a high-impact AI Engineering organization responsible for turning cutting-edge AI techniques into real revenue-driving product capabilities used by millions.

This role sits at the intersection of Engineering Product Machine Learning Growth and GTM requiring deep technical leadership exceptional product intuition and a track record of shipping AI systems that create measurable business outcomes.

You will define the long-term architecture for agentic AI at Apollo elevate engineering excellence mentor senior ICs and managers and accelerate Apollo’s position as the AI-native leader in the go-to-market ecosystem.

What You’ll Own & Deliver

AI Systems Strategy & Roadmap

• Define the multi-year technical vision for Apollo’s AI stack spanning agents orchestration inference retrieval and platformization.

• Prioritize high-impact AI investments by partnering with Product Design Research and Data leaders to align engineering outcomes with business goals.

• Establish technical standards evaluation criteria and success metrics for every AI-powered feature shipped.

Agentic Systems & Applied AI Delivery

• Lead the architecture and deployment of long-horizon autonomous agents multi-agent workflows and API-driven orchestration frameworks.

• Build reusable scalable agentic components that power GTM workflows like research enrichment sequencing lead scoring routing and personalization.

• Own the evolution of Apollo’s internal LLM platform for high-scale low-latency cost-optimized inference.

AI Assistants Search & Personalization

• Oversee model-driven experiences for natural-language interfaces RAG pipelines semantic search personalized recommendations and email intelligence.

• Partner with Product & Design to build intuitive conversational UX that hides underlying complexity while elevating user productivity.

Experimentation Evaluation & Observability

• Implement rigorous evaluation frameworks including offline benchmarking human-in-the-loop review and online A/B experimentation.

• Ensure robust observability monitoring and safety guardrails for all AI systems in production.

• Drive continuous model improvement through telemetry feedback loops and data-driven performance tuning.

Technical Leadership & Team Building

• Build and lead a world-class AI Engineering team of senior ICs managers and cross-functional collaborators.

• Foster a culture of experimentation velocity and pragmatic engineering where speed and safety coexist.

• Mentor engineers on system design LLM architectures distributed systems and applied ML best practices.

• Upskill the broader engineering org in AI-native development tooling and automation.

Cross-Functional Impact & Execution Excellence

• Collaborate closely with Data Science Product Design and Research teams to ensure AI capabilities integrate seamlessly into the GTM user journey.

• Accelerate learning cycles by combining LLM experimentation product iteration telemetry insights and engineering automation.

What We’re Looking For

Technical & Production Expertise

• 10–15+ years in software engineering with significant leadership experience owning AI/ML or applied LLM systems at scale.

• Proven history shipping LLM-powered features agentic workflows or AI assistants used by real customers in production.

• Deep understanding of LLM orchestration frameworks (LangChain LlamaIndex) RAG pipelines vector search embeddings and prompt engineering.

• Expert in backend & distributed systems (Python strongly preferred) and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP).

• Strong experience with telemetry observability and cost-aware real-time inference optimizations.

Leadership Strategy & Delivery

• Demonstrated ability to lead senior engineers define technical roadmaps and deliver outcomes aligned to business metrics.

• Experience building or scaling teams working on experimentation optimization personalization or ML-powered growth systems.

• Exceptional ability to simplify complex problems set clear standards and drive alignment across Product Data Design and Engineering.

• Strong product sense ability to weigh novelty vs. impact focus on user value and prioritize speed with guardrails.

AI-Native Engineering Mindset

• Fluent in integrating AI tools into engineering workflows for code generation debugging delivery velocity and operational efficiency.

• Comfortable balancing rapid experimentation with production rigor ensuring features are safe reliable and measurable.

• Thrives in an environment where learning velocity automation and continuous improvement are core values.

What Will Make You Successful at Apollo

• You raise the bar on engineering leadership — setting standards that elevate execution quality and innovation across the org.

• You operate with ownership and urgency. Apollo ships fast iterates fast and expects leaders to turn ambiguity into scalable systems.

• You connect AI research to real product outcomes. Novelty matters less than moving business metrics materially.

• You excel cross-functionally. You influence Product Desig and Data with clarity technical depth and pragmatic decision-making.

• You thrive in AI-native environments. You use AI daily to accelerate engineering improve workflows and teach your teams to do the same.

#LI-SD1

The listed Pay Range reflects base salary range except for sales roles the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ('OTE') range meaning that the range includes both the sales commission/sales bonus targets and annual base salary for the role. This pay range may be inclusive of several career levels at Apollo and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors including the candidate’s experience qualifications and location. Applicants interested in this role and who are not located in the US may request the annual salary range for their location during the interview process.

Additional benefits for this role may include equity; company bonus or sales commissions/bonuses; 401(k) plan; at least 10 paid holidays per year flex PTO and parental leave; employee assistance program and wellbeing benefits; global travel coverage; life/AD&D/STD/LTD insurance; FSA/HSA and medical dental and vision benefits.

Annual Pay Range

$300000—$450000 USD