Head Data Science & AI (Director)

About the Role:
CloudZero is pioneering the Cloud Cost Intelligence category, building the world's first Cloud Economics Operating System. We're transforming how cloud-driven companies connect engineering decisions to business outcomes in real-time.

This is a strategic scale-up role. You'll take our AI research and experimentation to the next level, transforming early prototypes into production systems that define the market. We've built a strong foundation with experiments in time series anomaly detection, GenAI applications, and cost attribution - now we need a hands-on leader to evolve these early innovations into customer-facing products.

You'll tackle genuinely hard problems that will define the future of FinOps:

• Real-time Unit Economics: Calculate per-unit costs across millions of transactions with dynamic efficiency management.

• Predictive Cost Intelligence: Predict and prevent cost efficiency breaches before they impact business.

• Multi-Cloud Attribution: Accurately attribute cloud spend across complex systems using probabilistic modeling.

• Autonomous Optimization: Build AI agents that make safe infrastructure changes within business constraints.

Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Hands-On Development

• Lead by example: spend 60-70% of your time building, architecting, and solving technical problems.

• Prototype novel ML/AI research ideas, and help translate them into production-ready systems that handle enterprise scale.

• Build AI-powered features (in partnership with product/engineering teams) for cost optimization, anomaly detection, and predictive analytics.

• Establish technical standards and development processes for AI/ML systems.

People Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Hire and develop a small team of AI/ML specialists

• Provide hands-on coaching and technical guidance to team members

• Foster a culture of innovation, continuous learning, and customer focus

• Lead by example in technical decision-making and problem-solving approach

• Partner closely with engineering teams to embed AI throughout the platform

• Translate complex AI concepts into business value for executives and customers

• Drive AI strategy alignment with company vision and product roadmap

• Represent CloudZero's AI capabilities in customer conversations and industry events

Qualifications:

• 8+ years in Data Science or ML Engineering at high-growth SaaS companies, building and deploying impactful production systems.

• Holds a degree in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related technical field.

• Hands-on technical leader with experience mentoring, coaching, and hiring data and ML talent.

• Fluent across the modern data science stack — data pipelines, modeling, deployment, and monitoring.

• Proven experience with time series modeling, forecasting, and anomaly detection systems.

• Skilled in Python and comfortable with cloud ML tools like SageMaker, Bedrock, and related infrastructure.

• Experience integrating GenAI/LLM systems into production use cases, with a realistic understanding of their strengths and challenges.

• Excellent communicator — able to explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical and executive stakeholders.

• Pragmatic and impact-driven — prioritizes simplicity, customer value, and speed over complexity.

• Stays current with research but thrives in environments where innovation translates quickly into customer outcomes.

Please note: CloudZero is unable to sponsor employment visas. Candidates must have permanent authorization to work in the United States without the need for current or future sponsorship.