DirectorSr. Director, AI Innovation

Location:

New York City Hybrid (3 days per week)

Who we are

Doubleverify is the industrys leading media effectiveness platform that leverages AI to drive superior outcomes for global brands. By creating more effective transparent ad transactions DV strengthens the digital advertising ecosystem ensuring a fair value exchange between buyers and sellers of digital media. Hundreds of Fortune 500 advertisers employ our unbiased data and analytics to drive campaign quality and effectiveness and to maximize return on their digital advertising investments globally.

About the role

DoubleVerify is investing in practical business-driving AI. Were hiring a Director / Senior Director to lead our Skunkworks R&D team and drive cross-company AI adoption. This leader will manage a small team of senior engineers coordinate delivery of back-office AI initiatives across many stakeholders and advise senior executives on strategy governance and transformation.

What youll do

• Lead the Skunkworks team to de-risk high-impact product/engineering workstreams through fast rigorous R&D: proofs of concept technical spikes evaluation pilots and recommendations (build/buy/partner).

• Own the AI roadmap for internal enablement orchestrating initiatives across Data Security Legal/Privacy IT Product Finance and Operations (e.g. agentic workflows knowledge retrieval internal copilots automation).

• Establish disciplined AI practices: experimentation frameworks offline/online evals A/B testing prompt/memory/version control guardrails safety & red-teaming cost/perf tracking and observability.

• Be an executive advisor on AI strategy: opportunity sizing risk/controls vendor landscape TCO and change-management; present clear recommendations and tradeoffs.

• Scale the team and function: hire mentor and grow senior engineers and future managers; set goals operating cadences and SLAs.

• Ship impact quickly: move from concept to pilot to production hand-off with clear success criteria and documentation.

• Partner deeply with product & platform teams to accelerate the integration of AI components into existing systems at scale.

• Champion compliance & trust: data governance privacy-by-design IP/PII handling model/content safety and vendor risk management.

Your operating style

• Structured & data-driven: translates ambiguous problems into crisp hypotheses milestones metrics and decision trees; builds execution plans with dependencies owners risks and communication cadences across many stakeholders.

• Excellent communicator: adapts to audiences from principal engineers to the C-suite; drives consensus among many stakeholders.

• Business-savvy: connects technical choices to customer value and P&L; MBA or equivalent experience is a plus.

• Builder-manager: leads senior engineers grows the managerial track and stays hands-on enough to unblock the team.

Our manager expectations (explicit)

• Lead a team of senior engineers with clarity and empathy; set crisp goals and hold the bar on quality.

• Demonstrate previous success leading a small engineering team and growing the managerial track (hiring mentoring career paths performance).

• Foster a culture of structure measurement and writing: clear docs design reviews and post-mortems.

Your qualifications

• Proven experience managing a small engineering team (and desire/ability to grow managers).

• Track record delivering AI/ML or LLM-powered systems from concept to production (POCs pilots GA) in partnership with product and platform teams.

• Strong grasp of modern AI stacks: Python; model orchestration vector stores retrieval patterns evals; MLOps/LLMOps concepts (observability drift prompt/version management).

• Familiarity with security privacy and governance considerations for AI (data retention PII controls model/content safety vendor risk).

• Ability to design experimentation & evaluation plans (offline metrics synthetic and human evals A/B tests) and make decisions from evidence.

• Outstanding written & verbal communication; ability to create exec-ready narratives and technical docs.

Preferred

• Experience in ad tech marketing tech or other high-scale data domains.

• Hands-on background with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) data platforms (e.g. Snowflake/Databricks/BigQuery) orchestration (Airflow/Kubernetes) and modern app stacks.

• Exposure to agents tool-use and workflow automation; grounding in cost/performance tradeoffs for inference (latency throughput caching).

• MBA or demonstrated business/financial acumen (TCO modeling vendor contracts ROI).

• Experience running an internal skunkworks or innovation program.

Leveling guidelines

Were open to either level; well calibrate scope autonomy and compensation accordingly.

• Director AI

• Leads the Skunkworks team and portfolio of internal AI initiatives.

• Influences cross-functional priorities; directly manages senior ICs

• Typical background: 8 years in software/ML 3 years people leadership.

• Senior Director AI

• Owns a broader multi-team portfolio and AI strategy for internal enablement; heavier exec interface.

• Builds and scales a leadership bench; drives multi-quarter roadmaps and budgets.

• Typical background: 12 years in software/ML 5 years people leadership including managers.

What success looks like

First 30-90 days

• Audit and rationalize the current Skunkworks portfolio; establish a single intake/prioritization funnel and shared evaluation rubric.

• Land the AI delivery playbook (evals guardrails observability cost tracking) and the cross-functional operating cadence (weekly standups; monthly QBRs).

• Ship 1-2 quick-win pilots with measurable value; produce a roadmap with business cases and alignment.

6 months

• 4 internal AI workflows in production across at least two functions (e.g. Support Sales Ops Finance People Ops) with clear SLAs and ownership in the destination teams.

• Baseline early ROI: e.g. 10-15% reduction in cycle times or hours saved for target processes; vendor TCO plan in place.

• Executive reporting live for adoption quality risk and cost.

12 months

• 10 production-grade AI workflows operated by business owners with Skunkworks owning the innovation pipeline and standards.

• Company-wide evaluation & guardrail framework adopted (prompt/model versioning safety tests red-team results incident playbooks).

• Material business impact: aggregate $ annualized savings or revenue lift tied to shipped initiatives; measurable quality improvements (e.g. 20-30% ticket deflection 15-25% faster close rates 20% faster onboarding) depending on domains selected.

• Org scaling: Skunkworks team grown with a repeatable idea pilot production pipeline and well-defined handoffs.

• Vendor & platform posture: consolidated contracts right-sized model choices (open vs. proprietary) and documented migration paths to control cost/latency.

Leading & lagging indicators

• Leading: number of qualified opportunities in the pipeline cycle time from idea pilot eval coverage guardrail test pass rates stakeholder NPS.

• Lagging: time saved error reduction quality scores ticket deflection win rates revenue/expense impact vs. baseline.

The successful candidates starting salary will be determined based on a number of non-discriminating factors including qualifications for the role level skills experience location and balancing internal equity relative to peers at DV. The estimated salary range for this role based on the qualifications set forth in the job description is between $210000.00 - $320000.00. This role will also be eligible for bonus/commission (as applicable) equity and benefits.The range above is for the expectations as laid out in the job description; however we are often open to a wide variety of profiles and recognize that the person we hire may be more or less experienced than this job description as posted.

Not-so-fun fact:Researchshows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of job criteria women and other marginalized groups tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes but youre not sure that you check every box apply anyway!