Research Scientist, Research

Snap • Bellevue, NE

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Snap Research is an innovation engine for Snap, developing technology that enhances existing products and exploring ideas that could change how people communicate and express themselves. The User Modeling and Personalization Research Team develops new ways to model user behavior and enables user-centric machine learning systems for personalized experiences across Snap. Its work includes generative and language models for information retrieval, efficient large-scale recommender systems, and representation learning for structured graph data.

The Research Scientist will lead research in user modeling and personalization, build and evaluate scalable research prototypes, share expertise with teammates and interns, publish findings at leading conferences, and partner with engineering teams to deliver technology to Snapchat users.

Requirements

• PhD in a related technical field such as computer science, machine learning, or mathematics, or equivalent years of practical work experience.
• Strong technical knowledge of machine learning, information retrieval, personalization, and state-of-the-art deep learning literature.
• Demonstrated ability to define, lead, and execute challenging research projects.
• Strong computer science fundamentals, problem-solving skills, and engineering skills, including Python and PyTorch.
• Pragmatic, hands-on approach to research, with a drive to build working prototypes rather than relying solely on theoretical exploration.
• Proven ability to mentor interns, students, and junior researchers.
• Strong familiarity with PyTorch and hands-on experience with distributed (multi-node and multi-GPU) machine-learning model training, inference, and experimentation.
• Experience applying language models to generative search, ranking, and/or personalization.
• Track record of publications (first-author preferred) in top machine learning, information retrieval, or language venues.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with large-scale machine learning problems in an academic or industrial research lab, or equivalent open-source experience.
• Experience with large-scale data processing, collection, or synthesis using machine-learning frameworks on enterprise cloud solutions such as Google Cloud, AWS, and/or Azure.
• Familiarity with post-training, preference optimization, large-scale search or recommendation interaction data, and recommender systems.
• Demonstrated ability to transform cutting-edge research into tangible product improvements.

Responsibilities

• Lead research projects in user modeling and personalization, including generative modeling, recommendation systems, information retrieval, and efficiency.
• Build scalable research prototypes and evaluate them in large-scale machine learning scenarios.
• Share expertise with teammates and interns.
• Publish research findings at top conferences.
• Partner with engineering teams to deliver technology to Snapchat users.

Benefits

• Paid parental leave.
• Comprehensive medical coverage.
• Emotional and mental health support programs.
• Compensation packages that provide an opportunity to share in Snap's long-term success.
• Equity in the form of RSUs.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree