Senior Applied AI Research Scientist

The role

You will scope and drive foundation model research and development using behavioral datasets. You will design experiments, own model evaluation, and deploy models for real-time inference.

What you will do

• Identify and scope opportunities, design rigorous experiments, and execute on the roadmap for foundation model research and development.
• Own the evaluation bar for foundation model performance including benchmarks, calibration, drift and degradation monitoring.
• Take models from data prep and tokenization through pretraining, fine-tuning, distillation, quantization, and deployment.
• Partner with Engineering on training infrastructure, GPU efficiency, feature and embedding stores, and serving at production scale.
• Work with client-facing teams and customers to turn model capabilities into decisions.
• Partner with Legal, Compliance, and customer model risk teams to build explainability, documentation, and governance.

Required qualifications

• 4+ years in applied machine learning, quantitative modeling, or ML engineering.
• At least one foundation model pre trained or substantially adapted and put in front of real traffic.
• Hands-on self-supervised pre training experience, plus practical fine-tuning and adaptation.
• Production experience with model serving, versioning, monitoring, and rollback.
• Ability to self-manage and drive ambiguous applied research projects.
• Strong Python.
• Strong SQL.
• Comfort preparing very large datasets.

Nice to have

• Background in fraud, AML, payments, credit, or adversarial machine learning
• Experience building and evaluating LLM-based agents in production
• Publications, released models, or open source contributions in representation learning or sequence modeling
• Experience with model risk management and documentation in a regulated financial environment

Benefits

• Generous compensation in cash and equity
• Early exercise for all options, including pre-vested
• Work from anywhere: Remote-first Culture
• Flexible paid time off and Year-end break
• Health insurance, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents - US and Canada specific
• 4% matching in 401k / RRSP - US and Canada specific
• MacBook Pro delivered to your door
• One-time stipend to set up a home office — desk, chair, screen, etc.
• Monthly meal stipend
• Monthly social meet-up stipend
• Annual health and wellness stipend
• Annual Learning stipend

Before you apply

• You'll need to keep a home base in the country you're hired in.

About the company

Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime. Their integrated solution unifies data across risk teams to help organizations stop fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and AML operations.