Staff AI research scientist

About the role

AI research at WRITER isn't just about publishing papers — it's about building the scientific foundation that powers ambitious enterprise AI deployments. As a Staff AI Research Scientist, you'll drive a high-impact research agenda focused on large language models, agentic reasoning, and system-level capabilities that make AI useful at enterprise scale. Your work will advance the field while shipping directly into products used by hundreds of thousands of people.

You will work on post-training, planning, multi-step reasoning, and agentic workflows that shape how enterprise AI behaves, performs, and scales. The role is hybrid, based in San Francisco or New York City, reporting to the VP of AI Research.

What you'll do

• Lead an independent, high-impact research agenda on large language models and agentic systems, owning projects from hypothesis through training, evaluation, and production deployment
• Design and execute large-scale post-training experiments using supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), RLAIF, DPO, and emerging alignment techniques
• Improve multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use in enterprise agentic workflows
• Build novel evaluation benchmarks and methodologies for complex enterprise tasks
• Develop scalable data synthesis and curation pipelines, including LLM-as-judge frameworks, synthetic data generation, and adversarial dataset construction
• Translate research insights into improvements to enterprise-grade LLMs in collaboration with research engineering and product teams
• Publish and present original research at top-tier venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and ACL
• Mentor researchers and engineers, maintaining high standards for scientific rigor and experimental design

What you need

• 7+ years of hands-on ML research experience
• Deep expertise in large language model pre-training and post-training
• Experience training models at scale and debugging distributed jobs
• Expert knowledge of SFT, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, GRPO, and related alignment techniques
• Strong command of Python and PyTorch (or JAX)
• Experience building scalable training pipelines, evaluation infrastructure, and data synthesis workflows
• Publication record at top-tier ML/AI conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, EMNLP or equivalent)
• Hands-on experience designing or evaluating agentic systems with multi-step reasoning and tool use
• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or related field, or equivalent research experience

Benefits & perks (US Full-time employees)

• Generous PTO and company holidays
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Paid parental leave (16 weeks)
• Fertility and family planning support
• Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri
• Flexible spending accounts and health savings account with company contribution
• Annual wellness and learning stipends
• Company-wide and team off-sites
• Competitive compensation, stock options, and 401k

Compensation Range: $234.3K - $296K