AI research scientist
About The Position
WRITER is hiring an AI Research Scientist to develop the scientific foundation behind enterprise AI deployments. The role focuses on large language models, agentic reasoning, and system-level capabilities that make AI useful at enterprise scale. The successful candidate will lead research from initial hypothesis through model training, evaluation, and production deployment, advancing the field while delivering capabilities directly into WRITER products. Research areas include post-training, planning, multi-step reasoning, and agentic workflows. The role will shape how WRITER's models behave, perform, and scale, with support from company infrastructure and cross-functional teams. It is a hybrid position based in WRITER's San Francisco or New York City hub and reports to the VP of AI Research. The role is open to Senior, Staff, and Senior Staff applicants, with compensation scaled to experience, expertise, and scope.
Requirements
- At least 7 years of hands-on machine learning research experience, with deep expertise in LLM pre-training and post-training; experience training models at scale, debugging distributed jobs, and shipping measurable improvements.
- A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated research experience with a strong portfolio of independent published work.
- Expert-level knowledge of post-training methods including SFT, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, GRPO, and related alignment and reasoning techniques, with experience applying them to production-grade systems.
- Strong command of Python and PyTorch or JAX, and the engineering ability to build and scale training pipelines, evaluation infrastructure, and data synthesis workflows.
- A meaningful publication record at competitive ML/AI venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, or EMNLP, or equivalent, demonstrating the ability to originate ideas and independently execute a multi-month research agenda.
- Hands-on experience designing or evaluating agentic systems that plan, reason through multi-step tasks, use tools, and recover from errors, plus an understanding of their failure modes and how to address them.
- Collaborative communication skills, including the ability to work across research, engineering, and product and explain complex ideas clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and pursue novel research directions.
- Ability to own projects end-to-end, take accountability for results, and focus on impact for customers.
Responsibilities
- Lead an independent, high-impact research agenda on large language models and agentic systems, from early hypothesis through model training, evaluation, and production deployment.
- Design and execute large-scale post-training experiments using supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, and emerging alignment techniques, focusing on multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use in enterprise agentic workflows.
- Build novel evaluation benchmarks and methodologies to rigorously measure model performance on complex, real-world enterprise tasks.
- Develop scalable data synthesis and curation pipelines, including LLM-as-judge frameworks, synthetic data generation, and adversarial dataset construction.
- Translate research insights into concrete improvements to WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs and help shape model architecture and training roadmaps in partnership with research engineering and product teams.
- Publish and present original research at leading venues and represent WRITER in the scientific community.
- Mentor researchers and engineers and help establish high standards for scientific rigor, experimental design, and research culture.
Benefits
- Generous paid time off and company holidays.
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their families.
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave for all parents.
- Fertility and family planning support.
- Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri.
- Flexible spending account and dependent care FSA options.
- Health savings account for eligible plans, with a company contribution.
- Annual wellness stipend for expenses such as gym, massage, chiropractic care, and personal training.
- Annual learning and development stipend.
- Company-wide and team off-sites.
- Competitive compensation, company stock options, and a 401(k).
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
Ph.D. or professional degree
