Director of Applied Science and Engineering - Knowledge Graphs & AI

Outreach; United States; Remote; USD 250,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

Outreach seeks a Director of Applied Science and Engineering to lead the Knowledge Graph and contextual AI initiatives. You will set the research agenda, hire and grow a high-performing team, and drive production-grade graph reasoning across customer data.

You will shape architecture, enable scalable pipelines, and partner with cross-functional leaders to deliver measurable business impact while advancing research and industry collaboration.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, ML, NLP, or related field with focus on knowledge representation and reasoning, graph neural networks, information extraction, recommender systems or conversational AI

Responsibilities

• Define multi-year technical roadmap for Knowledge Graph platform and contextual inference.
• Lead and mentor a team of applied scientists and research engineers.
• Architect per-tenant knowledge graph schemas and data models; own graph DB decisions.
• Oversee information extraction pipelines from calls, emails, and CRM data.
• Advance graph-based models and representation learning for production use cases.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, Design, and Data to align roadmap with product priorities.

Skills

Knowledge graph

Applied ML

Leadership

Python

Golang

Graph databases

Education

PhD in Computer Science or ML

Job description

About Outreach

Outreach, founded in 2014, is the only complete agentic AI platform for revenue teams. Outreach infuses agentic AI, conversation intelligence, and assistive AI to power hundreds of use cases across revenue motions. From new logo prospecting to expansions, deal acceleration, driving retention, and forecasting, Outreach AI automates workflows and frees sellers to focus on more strategic conversations and actions. Revenue leaders benefit from connected account visibility, performance insights, and higher forecasting accuracy across every GTM team. World leading enterprise organizations use Outreach to power their revenue teams, including Databricks, SAP, Siemens, and Verizon to name a few.

The Role

We are looking for a Director of Applied Scienceand Engineeringto lead the vision, strategy, and execution of Outreach’s Knowledge Graph and contextual AI capabilities. This is a senior leadership position for someone who combines deep technicalexpertisein knowledge representation, graph-based learning, and reasoning systems with the ability to build, inspire, and scale a high-performing team.

You will own the end-to-end technical direction of a per-tenant contextual knowledge graph that captures the full complexity of each customer’s sales environment: accounts, deals, contacts, rep behaviors, competitive landscape, and the signals buried in calls, emails, and CRM activity. This graph is the reasoning backbone of the platform, powering next-best-action recommendations, deal risk signals, coaching suggestions, competitive intelligence, and agentic AI workflows. In this role, you willsetthe research agenda, definethe architecture, hire and grow the team, and drive measurable business impact through applied science innovation.

Your Daily Adventures Will Include:

• Technical Vision & Strategy: Define and own the multi-year technical roadmap for Outreach’s Knowledge Graph platform, including entity resolution, temporal reasoning, graph-based learning, and contextual inference. Translate business objectives into a coherent applied science strategy that balances research ambition with production delivery.
• Team Leadership: Build, hire, and lead a team of applied scientists and research engineers. Establish team culture, research rigor, career development frameworks, and a high bar for both scientific quality and production impact. Mentor senior ICs into technical leaders.
• Knowledge Graph Architecture: Drive the design of per-tenant knowledge graph schemas, ontologies, and data models tailored to the sales execution domain. Own decisions on graph databases, query languages, storage engines, and tenant isolation strategies at scale.
• Information Extraction at Scale: Oversee pipelines that extract structured knowledge from unstructured conversational and document data (sales calls, emails, CRM notes), including coreference resolution, relation extraction, event detection, and entity linking.
• Reasoning & Inference Systems: Lead the development of reasoning and inference layers over the knowledge graph to power next-best-action suggestions, deal risk scoring, coaching recommendations, competitive intelligence, and agentic AI decision-making.
• Representation Learning & Graph ML: Direct research into graph-based models (GNNs, relational embeddings, link prediction, temporal graph networks) over heterogeneous, multi-relational graph structures to support downstream reasoning, retrieval, and recommendation tasks.
• Cross-functional Leadership: Partner with leaders in Engineering, Product, Design, and Data to align science investments with product priorities. Represent the applied science function in executive reviews, roadmap planning, and technical design reviews.
• Research-to-Production Pipeline: Establish processes and infrastructure for moving from research exploration to production deployment: experiment tracking, model evaluation frameworks, A/B testing, and continuous model improvement loops.
• Industry & Academic Engagement: Keep 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) isrequired.
• 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.

Why You’ll Love It Here

Highly competitive salary

25 days annual vacation time + sick time and casual leave

Group medical policy coverage available to employees and up to 5 eligible family members

OPD benefit covered up to INR 10,000

Life insurance and personal accident insurance at 3x annual CTC

26 weeks of maternity leave pay, and 15 days of paternity leave pay

Opportunity to be part of company success via the RSU program

Diversity and inclusion programs that promote employee resource groups like OWN+ (Outreach Women’s Network), Adelante (Latinx community), OBX (Outreach Black Connection), Mosaic (AAPI community), Pride (LGBTQIA+), Gender+, Disability Community, and Veterans/Military

Employee referral bonuses to encourage the addition of great new people to the team

Fun company and team outings because we play just as hard as we work

Outreach is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.

Our success is reliant on building teams that include people from different backgrounds and experiences who can elevate assumptions and ideas with fresh perspectives. We’re dedicated to hiring the whole human, not just a resume. To that end, we look for a diverse pool of applicants-including those from historically marginalized groups. We would like to invite you to apply even if you don’t think you meet all of the requirements listed below. We don’t want a few lines in a job description to get between us and the opportunity to meet you.