Julie Belião joins Sentient Foundation as VP of Product

Julie Belião, former VP of Product at Mozilla.ai and a Google veteran, has joined the Sentient Foundation as VP of Product. She’ll help the nonprofit turn its open-source AI research into tools that developers and organizations can use.

Julie’s focus at Sentient

Julie will lead product strategy at Sentient, working across research and engineering to turn frontier AI advances into useful, widely adopted technologies. She will help shape the organization's product direction through Sentient Labs, connecting its research capabilities with real-world opportunities and long-term impact.

From open-source AI research to developer tools

Julie brings more than 15 years of experience across AI research, product development, and open-source technology. Her career has followed a consistent thread: improving how humans interact with and benefit from AI. From early work in speech processing and multilingual technologies at Google, to data quality and curation at Defined.ai, and more recently open-source AI product development at Mozilla.ai, her work has focused on making AI more useful, accessible, and capable of extending human abilities. She holds a PhD spanning linguistics and computer science, with research focused on speech and language processing.

Her research spans spoken-language datasets and open training data for large language models. In 2025, she co-authored Towards Best Practices for Open Datasets for LLM Training, a Mozilla–EleutherAI collaboration on how to source, document, and share open training data.

More recently, alongside her leadership at Mozilla.ai, Julie contributed to public AI initiatives at Current AI, including AI Potluck, an effort to make open AI models more accessible and useful across languages and communities.

“AI research is moving incredibly fast, but technical progress doesn't automatically translate into products people need. What attracted me to Sentient is the opportunity to work with researchers pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and figure out where those advances can make a real difference. I also believe the next generation of AI infrastructure needs to remain open, so that more people can build on it, improve it, and benefit from it.” said Julie Belião, VP of Product at the Sentient Foundation.

Explore open source AI initiatives such as EvoSkill, ROMA, and OML model fingerprinting on Sentient Foundation’s GitHub.

Learn more about Julie’s work on her personal website.