Principal Applied Research Scientist (Generative AI and NLP)

Location: United States of America; flexible hybrid work with occasional in-person events or team sessions

Salary: $128,250–$266,875 per year, with potential discretionary annual bonus or commissions

Company

Consumer technology organization developing intelligent, personalized email and communication experiences at petabyte scale.

What you will do

• Lead research and development of deep learning and generative AI models for large-scale email and communication data.
• Fine-tune and adapt open-source foundation models using LoRA, adapters, and quantization-aware training.
• Design knowledge distillation approaches to create smaller, high-performance models for strict latency budgets.
• Build evaluation frameworks using LLM-as-a-judge methods, synthetic datasets, automated validation, and human review.
• Develop scalable training and evaluation workflows for high-throughput production environments.
• Set technical direction for agent-based systems, tool use, generative AI roadmaps, and model governance while mentoring researchers and engineers.

Requirements

• PhD preferred or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related field.
• 9+ years of hands-on applied machine learning and deep learning experience, including large-scale NLP and generative models.
• Experience fine-tuning LLMs with LoRA or other parameter-efficient methods, plus knowledge distillation or model compression.
• Experience building LLM-based agents, tool-use workflows, multi-agent orchestration, synthetic data pipelines, and evaluation frameworks.
• Deep understanding of encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder transformer architectures.
• Proficiency in Python, PyTorch or TensorFlow, Hugging Face tooling, and scalable data and training workflows.

Nice to have

• Large-scale distributed training and inference experience.
• Experience optimizing models for on-device or resource-constrained environments.
• Knowledge of prompt engineering, RLHF, DPO, model alignment, or agent frameworks.
• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in NLP or generative AI.
• Experience with GCP, AWS, or large-scale experimentation infrastructure.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible hybrid work with advance notice for occasional office or team events.
• Healthcare benefits and a 401(k) plan.
• Backup childcare and education stipends.
• Inclusive workplace supported by employee resource groups.
• Accessibility assistance and reasonable accommodations during the hiring process and employment.