AI Research Scientist
About The Position
U.S. Bank is seeking an AI Scientist to join its Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence (AI CoE), which advances the bank’s AI strategy through applied research, innovation, rapid prototyping, and enterprise deployment. This hands-on role spans the AI research and development lifecycle, from evaluating emerging technologies and conducting experiments to developing and deploying production-grade AI solutions. The successful candidate will apply scientific and engineering expertise to identify business value, build prototypes, and help evolve successful concepts into scalable enterprise capabilities. The role focuses particularly on generative AI, large language models, multimodal AI, and agentic AI systems. The candidate will stay engaged with academic and industry developments and contribute to AI innovation within the bank. They will collaborate with software engineers, platform teams, product managers, and business stakeholders to transition prototypes into production while balancing scalability, security, compliance, and operational needs. The position requires working from a U.S. Bank location three or more days per week.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field such as statistics, computer science, engineering, or applied mathematics, or equivalent work experience.
- Eight or more years of relevant experience.
Nice To Haves
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Computational Linguistics, or a related field is strongly preferred.
- Deep expertise in machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, transformer architectures, and foundation models.
- Experience with generative AI technologies, including LLMs, fine-tuning, RAG systems, model evaluation, and inference optimization.
- Experience building and evaluating agentic AI systems, multi-agent workflows, AI orchestration frameworks, and autonomous decision-making architectures.
- Hands-on experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face, LangChain, LangGraph, or equivalent AI ecosystems.
- Demonstrated record of innovation through publications, patents, open-source contributions, conference presentations, or impactful AI solution delivery.
- Experience developing AI solutions in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, insurance, or telecommunications.
- Strong communication skills and ability to translate complex AI concepts into actionable business outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Monitor, evaluate, and experiment with emerging AI technologies, research breakthroughs, and industry trends, particularly generative AI, large language models, multimodal AI, and agentic AI systems.
- Identify opportunities to apply advanced AI techniques to complex financial services business problems.
- Conduct original AI research and exploratory investigations to assess the feasibility and value of novel approaches.
- Develop hypotheses, design experiments, evaluate results, and communicate findings to technical and business stakeholders.
- Contribute to patents, technical publications, whitepapers, prototypes, and innovation initiatives.
- Rapidly transform research concepts into working prototypes and proof-of-concepts.
- Design, develop, and validate AI solutions across the full lifecycle, from data preparation and modeling through deployment and monitoring.
- Build experimental and production-ready solutions using modern AI/ML tools, frameworks, and cloud platforms.
- Apply best practices in model evaluation, benchmarking, explainability, security, and responsible AI.
- Develop solutions using foundation models, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning techniques, and agentic workflows.
- Design and evaluate AI agents, multi-agent systems, orchestration frameworks, tool-use architectures, memory systems, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
- Contribute to best practices for prompt engineering, model adaptation, evaluation, observability, and governance of LLM-based systems.
- Assess emerging model architectures for applicability in a highly regulated environment.
- Partner with software engineers, platform teams, product managers, and business stakeholders to transition successful prototypes into production environments.
- Contribute to deployment and operationalization efforts for AI solutions.
- Balance innovation, scalability, security, compliance, and operational requirements throughout solution development.
- Share knowledge and provide technical guidance to peers and junior team members.
- Take ownership of assigned initiatives and deliver AI capabilities from concept through deployment.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision healthcare coverage.
- Basic term and optional term life insurance.
- Short-term and long-term disability coverage.
- Pregnancy disability and parental leave.
- 401(k) and employer-funded retirement plan.
- Paid vacation, from two to five weeks depending on salary grade and tenure.
- Up to 11 paid holiday opportunities.
- Adoption assistance.
- Sick and Safe Leave accruals of one hour for every 30 hours worked, up to 80 hours per calendar year unless otherwise provided by law.
- Incentive and recognition programs.
- Equity stock purchase, 401(k) contribution, and pension, subject to eligibility requirements.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
