Vice President, Data Science at five9

This is a high-impact leadership role for a seasoned AI expert who thrives at the intersection of executive strategy and technical execution. Despite the "Mid-l

Work type: remote

Location: United States (Remote)

Salary: $233,000 – $512,000/yr

Type: Full-time

Summary

This is a high-impact leadership role for a seasoned AI expert who thrives at the intersection of executive strategy and technical execution. Despite the "Mid-level" label in the metadata, the requirements demand a heavyweight professional with 12+ years of experience and an advanced degree (PhD preferred). You’ll need deep expertise in Generative AI, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic architectures to lead a team that builds customer-facing AI products at scale. The compensation range is exceptionally broad, topping out at over $500k, reflecting the seniority and specialized nature of the role. While it is a VP-level position, it is uniquely "hands-on," meaning you’ll balance hiring and board-level presentations with occasional coding and experiment reviews. The role offers excellent flexibility as a fully remote position (unless you live near San Ramon) and includes premium benefits like 100% employee health coverage. **You might be a good fit if you...** * Have a Ph.D. or Master’s in a quantitative field plus a decade-plus track record in applied AI research. * Can navigate the entire LLM lifecycle, from fine-tuning and prompt engineering to building production-grade MLOps pipelines. * Enjoy being a "player-coach"—setting the technical vision while staying close to the codebase and research papers. * Are comfortable acting as a public-facing spokesperson, publishing thought leadership, and engaging directly with enterprise customers.

Job Description

Join us in bringing joy to customer experience. Five9 is a leading provider of cloud contact center software, bringing the power of cloud innovation to customers worldwide.

Living our values everyday results in our team-first culture and enables us to innovate, grow, and thrive while enjoying the journey together. We celebrate diversity and foster an inclusive environment, empowering our employees to be their authentic selves.

As Vice President of Data Science, you will lead and grow our in-house data science team. This team is responsible for research, experimentation, data collection and curation, and data analysis that contributes to the performance of Five9’s AI products. Tasks include evaluation of and selection of AI agent architectural frameworks, evaluation and comparison of LLM models across commercial and open source choices, model fine-tuning for dedicated tasks, prompt engineering, prompt structure and design, and composite model definitions and evaluations. The scale of Five9 provides a wealth of data that data science team has access to. The data science team is very much applied – their work directly makes its way into real products providing direct customer benefit.

As lead of this team, you will take complete ownership of the technical and operational direction of the organization, including growing to team to meet increased demand for its capabilities.

Key Responsibilities:

• Technical Direction Setting: As an expert in the leading edge of AI and data science, you will direct the team on the methodologies, practices, algorithms, experiments and processes they perform.

• Hands On: You are expected to also be hands on, not just a manger, and be directly responsible for some amount of the technical work in addition to directing the team.

• Organizational Growth: You will be tasked with growing the team, and ensuring we have the right talent to accomplish our goals.

• Collaborator and Spokesperson: You will act as an internal and external spokesperson for data science, and collaborate with stakeholders across the company. Internally, you will be expected to meet with product managers, executives and estaff, and be able to converse effectively with them. You will also occasionally meet with customers to understand how Five9 products, and the data science behind them, impacts the customers. You are expected to participate in industry activities, including publication of blog posts and papers, along with participation in AI conferences.

• 12+ years experience in data science or AI applied research, ideally at a best-in-class applied research organization.

• Deep Expertise in Modern AI/ML

• Extensive hands-on experience with LLMs, agentic architectures, retrieval-augmented systems, transformers, and composite model pipelines.

• Strong understanding of commercial and open-source model ecosystems (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral), including evaluation, benchmarking, and tradeoff analysis.

• Model Development & Optimization

• Proven ability to perform fine-tuning, supervised/unsupervised training, prompt engineering, prompt optimization, and model orchestration for real-world use cases.

• Experience designing evaluation frameworks, experiment methodologies, and robust model comparison workflows.

• Data Engineering & Curation

• Expertise in large-scale data collection, labeling, cleaning, and curation pipelines, preferably with conversational or unstructured text data.

• Familiarity with tools and techniques for data quality assessment, dataset versioning, and data governance.

• Applied Data Science & Analytics

• Strong proficiency in statistical analysis, A/B experimentation, causal inference, and performance measurement.

• Demonstrated success turning data insights into product improvements that drive measurable business outcomes.

• Software Development & Systems Thinking

• Ability to work with engineering teams using modern software practices (Python, data platforms, cloud-native environments, APIs, ML Ops tooling).

• Understanding of production ML systems, deployment patterns, monitoring, and safety/guardrail design.

• Cross-Functional Partnering

• Ability to collaborate effectively with product managers, engineering leaders, UX, and GTM teams to translate business needs into data science strategies.

• Adept at explaining complex technical concepts to executives, customers, and non-technical stakeholders.

• Communication & Storytelling

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including ability to publish thought leadership (papers, blog posts) and present at conferences.

• Team Development & Mentorship

• Passion for mentoring senior and junior data scientists, fostering technical excellence, and building a culture of experimentation and rigorous thinking.

• Customer Empathy

• Experience engaging directly with customers to understand their needs, gather feedback, and translate insights into product or model improvements.

• Vision Setting & Direction

• Ability to define the data science strategy for AI Agents and customer experience products, aligning with corporate priorities and market opportunities.

• Hands-On Leadership

• Comfortable being an active contributor—writing code, running experiments, reviewing research—while simultaneously guiding the team’s overall direction.

• Organizational Scaling

• Experience hiring, scaling, and structuring high-performing data science teams across multiple geographies.

• Operational Excellence

• Ability to build processes for experimentation, model evaluation, data quality management, and continuous delivery of data science innovation into product.

• Executive Presence & Influence

• Skilled at influencing E-staff and senior leadership, defending technical decisions, shaping product strategy, and representing data science internally and externally.

• Ethics, Safety & Risk Awareness

• Deep understanding of responsible AI principles, privacy considerations, and model safety, including evaluating risks when operating at enterprise scale.

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, Computational Linguistics, or a related field.

• Master’s degree in one of the above fields with significant applied industry experience in AI/ML leadership roles.

As part of our continued commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, Five9 supports pay transparency during the entire recruitment process. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate including, but not limited to: skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and specific work location. The range displayed reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the job across the United States. Your recruiter can share more about the specific compensation package during your hiring process.

Additionally, the total compensation package for this position may also include an annual performance bonus, stock, and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans.

Our total reward package also includes:

• Health, dental, and vision coverage, beginning on the first day of employment. Five9 covers 100% of the employee portion of the health, dental and vision coverage and shares a high portion of the dependent cost. We also offer Short & Long-Term Disability, Basic Life Insurance, and a 401k saving plan with employer matching.

• Access to an innovative mental health support platform that offers personalized care and resources in areas such as: therapy, coaching and self-guided mindfulness exercises for all covered employees and their covered dependents.

• Generous employee stock purchase plan.

• Paid Time Off, Company paid holidays, paid volunteer hours and 12 weeks paid parental leave.

The US base salary range for this role is below.
$233,000—$512,000 USD

View this job on nocollar jobs