Staff/Sr. Staff/Principal AI research scientist

The role

Lead an independent research agenda on large language models and agentic systems, from hypothesis through training, evaluation and production deployment. Work on post-training and multi-step reasoning for enterprise AI products used by hundreds of thousands of people daily.

What you will do

• Lead an independent, high-impact research agenda on large language models and agentic systems, from early hypothesis through training, evaluation and production deployment
• Design and run large-scale post-training experiments using SFT, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO and alignment techniques, focused on multi-step reasoning, planning and tool use
• Build novel evaluation benchmarks and methods for how models perform on complex, real-world enterprise tasks
• Develop data synthesis and curation pipelines, including LLM-as-judge frameworks, synthetic data and adversarial datasets
• Shape model architecture and training roadmap, working with research engineering and product teams
• Publish and present original research at top venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and ACL
• Mentor researchers and engineers on scientific rigor, experimental design and research culture

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of hands-on ML research experience
• Deep expertise in large language model pre-training and post-training, including training models at scale
• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated research experience with a strong published portfolio
• Expert knowledge of post-training methods including SFT, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO and GRPO, applied to production-grade systems
• Strong command of Python and PyTorch (or JAX), with ability to build training, evaluation and data pipelines
• Meaningful publication record at competitive ML/AI venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL or EMNLP
• Hands-on experience designing or evaluating agentic systems that plan, reason, use tools and recover from errors
• Ability to collaborate across research, engineering and product and explain complex ideas to technical and non-technical audiences
• Willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and pursue untried research directions
• Drive projects end-to-end with urgency and accountability for customer impact

Benefits

• Generous PTO plus company holidays
• Medical, dental and vision coverage for you and your family
• Paid parental leave for all parents (16 weeks)
• Fertility and family planning support
• Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri
• Flexible spending account and dependent FSA options
• Health savings account for eligible plans with company contribution
• Annual wellness stipend for gym, massage, chiropractor, personal training and similar
• Annual learning and development stipend
• Company-wide and team off-sites
• Competitive compensation, company stock options and 401k

Before you apply

• Open to Staff and Sr. Staff applicants; the posting says hiring may happen at multiple levels, with compensation scaled to experience and scope
• Benefits listed are for US full-time employees
• The posting says it will consider applicants with arrest and conviction records under the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance

About the company

WRITER is an AI platform for marketing and revenue teams, with autonomous agents and an Enterprise Brain built on governance and compliance. Founded in 2020, it serves Fortune 500 companies including major US banks, global CPG companies and healthcare insurers.