Senior Applied Scientist (AI)

TL;DR

Senior Applied Scientist (AI): Designing and productionizing efficient LLM and VLM inference methods with an accent on quantization, speculative decoding, and runtime optimization. Focus on bridging the gap between frontier research and scalable production deployment through rigorous experimentation and high-quality code.

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.