Senior AI Scientist at Cerence

What You Will Work On

Design and train large-scale transformer and hybrid foundation models. Navigate model architecture choices across text, multimodal, and emerging paradigms. Diagnose and resolve training instabilities at scale. Make scaling tradeoffs across data and compute. Define the technical direction for next-generation models.

Responsibilities

• Deep Learning & Transformer Foundations
  • Apply strong fundamentals in deep learning and representation learning.
  • Design and modify transformer architectures, including:
    • Attention variants
    • RoPE, ALiBi
    • Grouped Query Attention (GQA)
    • Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)
  • Build models from first principles, not just adapt pre-existing codebases.
• Optimisation Dynamics & Training Stability
  • Own optimiser and scheduler choices, including AdamW, Lion, Adafactor.
  • Manage learning-rate and warmup schedulers.
  • Understand and debug:
    • Optimiser instability
    • Gradient pathologies
• Scaling Laws & Compute Tradeoffs
  • Apply and validate scaling laws.
  • Navigate Chinchilla-style compute vs. data tradeoffs.
  • Make informed decisions about model size, dataset size, and training duration.
• Loss Functions & Alignment
  • Design and experiment with loss functions including:
    • Next-token prediction
    • Contrastive objectives
    • RLHF, DPO, GRPO
  • Understand how loss design impacts convergence, generalization, and alignment.
• Distributed Foundation Model Training
  • Design and execute large-scale training using:
    • FSDP
    • ZeRO-3
    • Tensor parallelism
    • Pipeline parallelism
  • Apply:
    • Mixed precision (bf16, fp8)
    • Gradient checkpointing
  • Partner closely with ML systems teams.

Benefits

• Salary range: $123,500.00 - $197,600.00 USD (offers typically not made at or near the top of the range; actual salary determined based on experience and other job-related factors)
• Annual bonus opportunity
• Insurance coverage (medical, dental, vision, life, and disability)
• Paid time off
• Paid holidays
• Company contribution to the RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan)
• Equity awards for certain positions and levels
• Remote and/or hybrid work available depending on the position

About the Company

Cerence Inc. (Nasdaq: CRNC) is the global industry leader in creating unique, moving experiences for the automotive world. Spun out from Nuance in October 2019, Cerence is an independent company working with leading automakers—including Ford, Fiat Chrysler, Daimler, Audi, BMW, Geely, and SAIC—to transform how a car feels, responds, and learns. With over 20 years of industry experience and leadership, Cerence powers more than 500 million cars on the road today across more than 70 languages. The company is focused on ambitious growth and innovation in the automotive voice assistant space.