AI Scientist — Commerce Labs

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action, tech meets trust, and innovation is a way of life. The Experience Commerce Labs builds agentic systems that learn efficiently over time from real interactions with customers, merchants, and the marketplace environment, pushing the boundary of what autonomous commerce agents can do at enterprise scale.

About the role

The Experience Commerce Labs is hiring an AI Scientist to design, prototype, and ship machine learning (ML) systems that power agentic commerce products. You'll work closely with research and product engineering to take ideas from whiteboard to production, with real customers and real-world data, and with direct line of sight into how your work shows up in Commerce Cloud storefronts.

Responsibilities

• Shopper Agents: Assist customers and answer engines in finding the products they need across Commerce Cloud storefronts.
• Merchant Agents: Help retailers automatically run their storefronts, from merchandising to promotions.
• Smart Infrastructure: Automated bot detection and order management that help the enterprise run efficiently at Commerce Cloud scale.
• Design and build agentic ML systems that learn from ongoing interaction with users and environments, not just static datasets.
• Run applied research experiments end-to-end, from problem framing and data analysis to model design, training, and evaluation.
• Prototype quickly and iterate: build hands-on proofs of concept, then help harden the most promising ones for production on Commerce Cloud.
• Collaborate with Commerce Cloud engineering, product, and other researchers to translate research results into shipped features.
• Stay current with the latest developments in ML and AI research and evaluate their applicability to commerce problems.
• Communicate findings clearly through internal writeups, demos, and, where relevant, external publications.

Requirements

• Hands-on machine learning experience: you've built, trained, and evaluated ML models yourself, not just directed others.
• Strong foundation in one or more of: reinforcement learning (RL), deep learning, optimization, causal inference, or operations research.
• Proficiency in Python and standard ML tooling (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
• Strong problem-solving skills and comfort working with ambiguous, open-ended problems.
• Ability to move fast from idea to working prototype.

Qualifications

• PhD (completed or in progress) in Applied Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Operations Research, or a related field.
• Strong record of published basic or applied AI research at top-tier conferences or journals (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, CVPR, RecSys, EC, EMNLP, ACL, or equivalent).
• Experience with agentic or multi-step decision-making systems, such as RL agents, large language model (LLM) based agents, or sequential decision-making.
• Prior experience applying ML to commerce, marketplaces, recommendation systems, or fraud and bot detection.
• Familiarity with e-commerce platforms or large-scale retail and commerce systems (e.g., Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, Adobe Commerce, or similar).
• Open-source contributions or a public body of work (e.g., on GitHub or Google Scholar).

Benefits

• Time off programs
• Medical, dental, vision, and mental health support
• Paid parental leave
• Life and disability insurance
• 401(k) and employee stock purchasing program

More details about company benefits can be found at Salesforce Benefits.

Pay

The typical base salary range for this position is $117,200 - $223,900 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range is $141,200 - $246,000 annually. The range represents base salary only and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity, or benefits.