AI Scientist — Commerce Labs

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

12d•Hybrid

About The Position

Salesforce is seeking an AI Scientist to join its Commerce Labs team. This role involves designing, prototyping, and shipping machine learning (ML) systems that power agentic commerce products. The Commerce Labs team focuses on building agentic systems that learn from real interactions to advance autonomous commerce agents at an enterprise scale. These systems are built on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, a platform that supports global brands and retailers. The AI Scientist will work on Shopper Agents to assist customers, Merchant Agents to automate storefront operations, and Smart Infrastructure for tasks like bot detection and order management. The position offers a unique opportunity to work with real production data and see research translated directly into features used by customers.

Requirements

Hands-on machine learning experience, meaning you've built, trained, and evaluated ML models yourself.
A strong foundation in one or more of: reinforcement learning (RL), deep learning, optimization, causal inference, or operations research.
Proficiency in Python and standard ML tooling (for example, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
Strong problem-solving skills and comfort working with ambiguous, open-ended problems.
Comfortable moving fast from idea to working prototype.

Nice To Haves

A PhD (completed or in progress) in Applied Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Operations Research, or a related field.
A strong record of published basic or applied AI research, for example at top-tier conferences or journals such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, CVPR, RecSys, EC, EMNLP, ACL, or equivalent.
Experience with agentic or multi-step decision-making systems, such as RL agents, large language model (LLM) based agents, or sequential decision-making.
Prior experience applying ML to commerce, marketplaces, recommendation systems, or fraud and bot detection.
Familiarity with e-commerce platforms or large-scale retail and commerce systems, such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, Adobe Commerce, or similar.
Open-source contributions or a public body of work, for example on GitHub or Google Scholar.

Responsibilities

Design and build agentic ML systems that learn from ongoing interaction with users and environments, not just static datasets.
Run applied research experiments end-to-end, from problem framing and data analysis to model design, training, and evaluation.
Prototype quickly and iterate: build hands-on proofs of concept, then help harden the most promising ones for production on Commerce Cloud.
Collaborate with Commerce Cloud engineering, product, and other researchers to translate research results into shipped features.
Stay current with the latest developments in ML and AI research and evaluate their applicability to commerce problems.
Communicate findings clearly through internal writeups, demos, and, where relevant, external publications.