Principal Research Scientist – Scaling (AI)

Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Salary: $280,000–$350,000 USD per year

Company

Databricks is a data and AI company providing a unified platform for data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and AI applications.

What you will do

• Lead and grow a multidisciplinary research team focused on LLM scaling, efficiency, and systems performance.
• Define research programs and roadmaps covering optimizer design, low-precision training and inference, scalable architectures, and efficient model adaptation.
• Design and oversee large-scale experiments, benchmarking state-of-the-art methods across quality, latency, throughput, cost, and energy usage.
• Develop high-quality research implementations and prototypes in Python and PyTorch.
• Collaborate with distributed systems and infrastructure teams on parallelism, memory management, hardware utilization, and distributed training.
• Translate research advances into reliable, safe, customer-impacting capabilities for the Databricks AI platform.

Requirements

• Experience leading research teams developing novel foundation model efficiency techniques with demonstrated industry impact.
• Deep expertise in generative AI, LLMs, distributed ML systems, model optimization, or responsible AI, with emphasis on large-scale efficiency.
• Strong programming skills and hands-on experience writing efficient Python and PyTorch code.
• Experience translating research innovations into scalable product capabilities with product and engineering partners.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.

Nice to have

• Experience with distributed training frameworks, compiler or kernel optimization, or memory- and compute-efficient model design.
• Industry and academic collaborations in large-scale machine learning and systems.
• Research publications at leading ML or systems conferences, influential open-source contributions, or widely deployed systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Work with a multidisciplinary AI research organization focused on scientific excellence and reproducible experimentation.
• Opportunities for publications, conference talks, academic collaborations, and open-source contributions.
• Mentorship and career development support for research scientists and engineers.
• Comprehensive benefits and perks, with details varying by region.
• Inclusive hiring practices and an environment designed to support diverse employees.