Sarah Sachs is the Lead of AI Engineering at Notion, where she oversees the organization's artificial intelligence initiatives and strategy. She is known for her distinctive approach to engineering culture and team structure in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI product development.

At Notion, Sachs leads the AI engineering function and manages the organization's internal structure through what she calls “Token Town”—a framework designed to align teams and decision-making around the deployment of frontier AI capabilities. Her role encompasses both technical direction and cultural leadership across the AI organization¹⁾.

Sachs advocates for a low-ego engineering culture where technical teams are encouraged to be flexible and willing to discard their own work when circumstances change. This approach is particularly relevant in the context of rapidly advancing large language models and frontier AI capabilities, where architectural assumptions and implementation details can become obsolete as new model capabilities emerge. Rather than defending previous decisions, her philosophy emphasizes quick pivots and architectural flexibility as competitive advantages.

Her work emphasizes two primary technical priorities:

* Evaluation Systems: Building robust systems for assessing AI model outputs and product quality. Effective evaluation frameworks are essential for productizing frontier AI capabilities and ensuring reliability in user-facing applications.

* Productizing Frontier AI: Translating cutting-edge AI capabilities into practical, user-facing features within Notion's products. This involves navigating the challenges of building products on top of rapidly evolving model capabilities.

The combination of these focus areas reflects a broader challenge in AI product development: how to build sustainable, maintainable systems when the underlying capabilities are advancing faster than traditional software engineering cycles.

• Stanford HAI
• Simon Last
• Mira Murati