Engineering leader building practical AI for real products

San Francisco Bay Area • [email protected] • linkedin.com/in/sarahmsachs

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I am not currently open to new opportunities! Recruiters — please save my inbox 🙏

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Notion is hiring on the AI team. If you’re interested, email me at [email protected]

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About

Engineering leader focused on shipping practical, high‑leverage AI into real products at scale. I blend hands‑on ML with org building, evaluation frameworks, and rigor around safety and reliability. I partner closely with product, design, infra, legal, and GTM to bring AI capabilities from research to production. Currently leading AI Modeling at Notion.

Experience

• Eng Lead, AI — Notion

  Jul 2024 – Present • San Francisco Bay Area • On‑site

  • Driving the next generation of Notion AI across reasoning, retrieval, and end‑to‑end drafting and editing.
  • Leading four core areas of our modeling efforts: Reasoning and Agentic Orchestration, Core Model Engineering, Search and Ranking, and Data Specialists & Evals.
  • I’m hiring across the org. Please reach out :)

• Director of Engineering (AI and Infrastructure) — Tome

  Oct 2023 – Jun 2024

  • Led strategy and delivery for AI features used by 18M+ users in AI‑augmented presentations.
  • Built Autotome (end‑to‑end presentation generation), professional image generation, relevant web image search, and iterative chat‑based editing.
  • Owned OpenAI partnership, prompt engineering, evals, data pipelines, deployment, and cost and latency optimization, including fine‑tuned GPT‑3.5 on reserved capacity.
  • Developed open‑source model strategy; fine‑tuned and evaluated Llama‑7B and Mistral; trained on Mosaic, deployed on Fireworks; evaluated SDXL, DALL·E 3, and LoRAs for imaging.

• Head of NLP & GenAI; previously EM, ML & Data Science — Robinhood

  Sep 2020 – Oct 2023 • Menlo Park, CA

  • Set company GenAI strategy, partnered with OpenAI, and co‑led company‑wide AI hackathon.
  • Transitioned BERT‑powered CX chatbot into a guarded, compliant generative assistant for a regulated fintech context.
  • Managed 8+ ML engineers, data scientists, and analysts; led ML product, experimentation, and analytics for CX.
  • Built NLP content moderation for cash product; led routing, causal inference, and support automation.
  • Culture and people leadership: founded Women in Tech ERG, created ML Engineer leveling, interviews, and hiring rubric.

• ML Tech Lead, Founding MLE — Sunshine (formerly Lumi Labs)

  2018 – Sep 2020 • Palo Alto, CA

  • Focused on graph theory and link prediction; trained custom RoBERTa language models.

• Software Engineer, Machine Learning — Google

  2016 – 2018 • Mountain View, CA

  • Local Search and dining verticals; applied ML for personalization.
  • Launched and patented Personal Score in Google Maps, featured at Google I/O 2018 keynote.

Talks and Media

Some talks on what we’re building:

Talk 1

Talk 2

Some partnerships we are proud of: