Research Scientist - Salesforce AI Research

Salesforce•Palo Alto, CA

1d•$117,200 - $285,800

About The Position

Salesforce AI Research is seeking entrepreneurial Research Scientists to build, ship, and scale the next generation of Enterprise AI. This is not a traditional research role: the scientist will work with founder-like ownership to identify high-impact research directions, prototype AI capabilities, validate ideas with customers, and develop promising concepts into production-ready solutions. The role offers access to Salesforce’s customer and product ecosystem and involves collaborating with product teams and enterprise customers to translate research into AI capabilities used at scale. The team advances enterprise AI, publishes at leading conferences, open-sources research, and collaborates with academic institutions. This role is open only to prior Salesforce interns; applicants who do not meet this requirement will not be considered.

Requirements

Must be a prior Salesforce intern; other applicants will not be considered.
Strong publication record at top AI venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ACL, EMNLP) and/or a proven track record of shipping AI research into real-world products.
Experience with Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or DeepSpeed.
Motivation to achieve real-world impact and bring research to users at scale.
Demonstrated expertise in one or more focus areas: agentic AI and reasoning; multimodal AI and computer vision; speech intelligence; or core modeling and post-training.
Demonstrated ability to conduct independent research and translate ideas into impactful systems.

Nice To Haves

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical field, or equivalent full-time industry experience in deep learning research or product.
Experience building and scaling ML models for real-world business applications.
Experience mentoring and advising other researchers.
Strong programming skills, such as competitive programming (e.g., ACM-ICPC) or open-source experience.
Thoughtfulness about responsible AI, trust, and the real-world impact of systems built.
Excellent problem-solving ability, including tackling novel challenges.
Excellent written and spoken communication skills.
Track record of cultivating strong working relationships and driving cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

Identify research directions with the potential to transform Enterprise AI.
Turn promising ideas into zero-to-one AI product prototypes.
Work directly with customers to validate needs, test solutions, and refine product direction.
Build robust models, agents, and AI systems for real-world enterprise use.
Partner with product, engineering, and go-to-market teams to bring solutions to market.
Conduct independent research and translate ideas into impactful systems.