Research Scientist
$150k - $450k • Sunnyvale, CA • Full-time
Posted 1y ago
Job Location
Sunnyvale, CA
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
Full-time
Categories
LLM Engineer
About the job
The Institute of Foundation Models is a research lab dedicated to building, understanding, using, and risk-managing foundation models. We aim to advance AI research, nurture future AI builders, and drive transformative contributions to a knowledge-driven economy. As a Research Scientist focusing on data-centric large language model (LLM) development, you will push the boundaries of how LLMs reason, retrieve, and interact with external information. Your work will involve identifying, collecting, and organizing datasets to enable complex reasoning tasks, and developing scalable systems and tooling to integrate research with engineering, directly impacting the performance and reliability of intelligent systems.
Responsibilities
- Lead research and implementation of reasoning-enhanced LLM capabilities through novel data collection, architecture design, and system integration.
- Design and implement pipelines to collect, curate, and structure open-source and web-scale data relevant to reasoning tasks, ensuring scalability and reproducibility.
- Build robust software to support fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment of LLMs that interact with structured and unstructured knowledge bases.
- Collaborate with ML researchers to create, test, and evaluate new approaches in information retrieval, agentic search, and RAG pipelines.
- Rapidly prototype tools, APIs, and infrastructure for enabling LLMs to reason over external information, and build datasets for identifying and analyzing LLM failure modes.
- Communicate research findings in internal documents and external publications.
- Contribute to design/code reviews and foster engineering best practices in a high-performance research environment.
- Represent MBZUAI at conferences and forums, promoting institutional leadership in safe, efficient, and high-impact AI systems.
- Perform other duties as reasonably directed by the line manager.
Requirements
- Master’s in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- PhD or equivalent research experience in Machine Learning, NLP, or Data Science with a focus on reasoning and LLMs preferred.
- Experience working with large language models, including fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and multi-modal interaction.
- Strong Python development skills with a focus on research-grade code and scalable data pipelines.
- Familiarity with collecting and processing large-scale datasets from open-source and web resources.
- Demonstrated ability to work with ML infrastructure (e.g., model evaluation, optimization, debugging).
- Proactive mindset with the ability to identify impactful research questions and execute on them with minimal supervision.
- Effective communication and collaboration skills for working in cross-functional teams.
- Experience designing and deploying agentic LLM systems, reasoning benchmarks, or RAG pipelines.
- Background in building complex knowledge retrieval systems (e.g., knowledge graphs, semantic search, indexing).
- Strong publication record in leading AI conferences (e.g., ICLR, ACL, NeurIPS, EMNLP).
- Familiarity with performance constraints in production environments and the trade-offs in model and data design.
- Prior contributions to open-source ML research or data tools.