Staff/Sr. Staff/Principal AI Research Scientist

Location: Hybrid, based out of the San Francisco or New York City hub, United States

Salary: $234K–$384K, plus equity

Company

Writer is an AI platform for enterprise marketing and revenue teams, providing autonomous agents, large language models, and governed enterprise intelligence for Fortune 500 customers.

What you will do

• Lead an independent research agenda on large language models and agentic systems from hypothesis through training, evaluation, and production deployment.
• Design large-scale post-training experiments using SFT, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, GRPO, and emerging alignment techniques to improve reasoning, planning, and tool use.
• Build evaluation benchmarks and methodologies for complex, real-world enterprise tasks.
• Develop data synthesis and curation pipelines, including LLM-as-judge frameworks, synthetic data generation, and adversarial datasets.
• Shape model architecture and training roadmaps in collaboration with research engineering and product teams.
• Publish at top-tier research venues and mentor researchers and engineers.

Requirements

• 7+ years of hands-on ML research experience, including large language model pre-training and post-training, training models at scale, debugging distributed jobs, and shipping measurable improvements.
• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related field, or equivalent research experience with a strong portfolio of independent published work.
• Expert knowledge of SFT, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, GRPO, and related alignment and reasoning techniques applied to production systems.
• Strong Python and PyTorch or JAX skills, with the ability to build and scale training pipelines, evaluation infrastructure, and data synthesis workflows directly.
• Meaningful publications at competitive ML/AI venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, or EMNLP.
• Hands-on experience designing or evaluating agentic systems that plan, reason through multi-step tasks, use tools, and recover from errors.
• Ability to collaborate across research, engineering, and product; challenge conventional approaches; own projects end to end; and communicate complex ideas clearly.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work from the San Francisco or New York City hub, reporting to the VP of AI Research.
• Generous PTO and company holidays.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus paid parental leave of 16 weeks for all parents.
• Fertility and family planning support, cancer testing, FSA and dependent FSA options, and eligible HSA contributions.
• Annual wellness and learning and development stipends, company and team off-sites, stock options, and 401(k).
• Full-time US employee benefits apply; Writer is an equal-opportunity employer.