Senior Applied Scientist (AI)

Location: Must be based in Palo Alto, California, United States

Salary: $195,200–$262,200 USD

Company

Nebius is a full-stack AI cloud platform building infrastructure for the global AI economy, ranging from GPU orchestration to inference optimization.

What you will do

• Own research projects from hypothesis through experiment, prototype, and production handoff.
• Define and execute research programs in efficient LLM and VLM inference with measurable production impact.
• Invent and evaluate methods for quantization, QAT, distillation, and KV-cache optimization.
• Build high-quality prototypes in PyTorch, Triton, or CUDA-adjacent frameworks.
• Design rigorous evaluation methodology covering latency, throughput, and memory footprint.
• Publish technical reports and papers to build external credibility.

Requirements

• PhD in computer science, machine learning, or a closely related field.
• Strong publication record or research artifacts in ML systems or efficient inference.
• Strong hands-on coding ability in Python and PyTorch.
• Deep understanding of transformer inference, decoding algorithms, and production-serving tradeoffs.
• Strong experimental design skills including statistical reasoning and failure analysis.
• Must be authorized to work in the United States.

Nice to have

• First-author publications in top-tier venues like NeurIPS, ICML, MLSys, or OSDI.
• Experience with vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, or FlashAttention.
• Experience with post-training techniques like SFT, DPO, or RLHF.

Culture & Benefits

• 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and families.
• 401(k) plan with up to 4% company match and immediate vesting.
• 20 weeks paid parental leave for primary caregivers.
• Remote work reimbursement of $85/month.
• Company-paid short-term, long-term, and life insurance.