Applied AI Scientist (PhD)

About the role

We are hiring an Applied AI Scientist to push the frontier of what is possible with LLMs, NLP, and machine learning in real-world environments. This is not a role for someone who wants to optimize benchmarks in isolation and hand work off to someone else. It is a role for someone who wants to see advanced research become customer-facing product quickly.

You will work closely with founders, product leaders, and engineers to turn advanced AI techniques into systems that operate under real production constraints.

Why this role

• Research and develop LLM-based solutions for NLP, document intelligence, semantic search, and data extraction.
• Design and improve prompt strategies, retrieval-augmented generation systems, and fine-tuned models.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to bring AI capabilities into customer-facing workflows.
• Build evaluation pipelines and benchmarks for accuracy, performance, and robustness.
• Stay current on new research and rapidly test promising techniques in practical settings.
• Operate as both a scientist and builder, with direct responsibility for whether ideas survive contact with real data.

What you'll do

• Research and develop LLM-based solutions for NLP, document intelligence, semantic search, and data extraction.
• Design and improve prompt strategies, retrieval-augmented generation systems, and fine-tuned models.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to bring AI capabilities into customer-facing workflows.
• Build evaluation pipelines and benchmarks for accuracy, performance, and robustness.
• Stay current on new research and rapidly test promising techniques in practical settings.
• Operate as both a scientist and builder, with direct responsibility for whether ideas survive contact with real data.

What we're looking for

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related field.
• Strong research background with publications in top-tier AI venues such as NeurIPS, ACL, ICML, or EMNLP.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, transformers, embeddings, or neural information retrieval.
• Proficiency in Python and ML tooling such as PyTorch, Hugging Face, and LangChain.
• Track record of applying research in practical, production-oriented systems.
• Strong technical judgment about what is novel, what is useful, and what is actually ready to ship.

Bonus if you have

• Experience with unstructured data such as PDFs, forms, contracts, or portals.
• Background in enterprise or B2B AI applications.
• Familiarity with insurance, legal, or document-heavy industries.