Applied AI Researcher

NTT DATA Services•Mahwah, NJ

4d•$139,872 - $209,808•Onsite

About The Position

NTT DATA is seeking an Applied AI Researcher to join their team in New Jersey. This role focuses on bridging advanced AI research with practical enterprise use cases, validating models, methods, and prototypes for production-grade solutions. The position emphasizes measurable business value, rigorous experimentation, model behavior, and the safe application of research in banking-relevant contexts. The research must be grounded in enterprise business use cases, considering factors like model, retrieval, data, evaluation, latency, cost, and safety decisions for production delivery on the AIRP platform. Cloud/AWS awareness is beneficial as research outputs will be handed off to engineering teams on AWS-hosted AIRP. The role involves owning the applied research agenda for LLMs, NLP, RAG, evaluation, multimodal AI, and agentic workflows, as well as developing prototypes, conducting experiments, designing benchmarks, and providing model-selection recommendations.

Requirements

Advanced degree preferred, usually MS or PhD in AI, ML, computer science, statistics, computational linguistics, mathematics, or related field.
Strong foundation in machine learning, deep learning, NLP, transformers, information retrieval, and generative AI.
Hands-on experience with LLMs, embeddings, RAG, model evaluation, and applied GenAI experimentation.
Python skills with PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, scikit-learn, or equivalent research frameworks.
Ability to design rigorous experiments and communicate findings to technical, product, business, risk, and governance stakeholders.
Ability to translate research results into production requirements suitable for an AWS-hosted enterprise platform.

Nice To Haves

Research or applied science experience in banking, finance, compliance, risk, legal, operations, financial crime, sanctions, or enterprise knowledge systems.
Experience with AWS Bedrock, SageMaker, vector search, MLflow, Databricks, model evaluation tooling, or cloud-based experimentation environments.
Publications, patents, internal research contributions, open-source AI contributions, or prior research-to-production handoffs.
Familiarity with Responsible AI, model validation, privacy constraints, audit documentation, and regulated deployment environments.

Responsibilities

Conduct applied research in LLMs, GenAI, NLP, information retrieval, multimodal AI, synthetic data, and agentic AI.
Design experiments to evaluate model performance, robustness, safety, scalability, interpretability, enterprise usefulness, and production feasibility.
Prototype AI solutions for KYC, credit underwriting, governance tracking, pitch book generation, Banker 360, Customer 360, deal library intelligence, financial crime quality, and sanctions screening.
Develop evaluation methodologies using golden datasets, adversarial testing, offline benchmarks, human review, business outcome metrics, and risk-specific acceptance criteria.
Assess prompt optimization, RAG, fine-tuning, instruction tuning, synthetic data generation, distillation, and model adaptation techniques.
Document model limitations, data assumptions, hallucination patterns, bias risks, performance boundaries, and control recommendations for regulated deployment.
Collaborate with engineers to convert prototypes into production-ready AIRP requirements, including latency, cost, observability, security, and AWS/cloud deployment considerations.
Track emerging AI research and translate relevant advances into practical recommendations for the enterprise.