Principal Applied Scientist, Small Language Models
2 months ago
New York
Job DescriptionPrincipal Applied Scientist, Small Language Models. Full-time New York City, NY, US Exclusive confidential search — details shared with qualified applicants. Benefits You'll Love • Top-tier medical, dental, and vision coverage, • 401(k)Become a Key Player as a Principal Applied Scientist, Small Language Models You will own the small, purpose-built language model that enforces compliance in real time, ensuring messages are safe before they are sent. In this hands-on senior individual contributor role you will drive model design, evaluation, and production performance, working directly with the founder and cross-functional stakeholders. Hybrid (3 days onsite in New York City). Here's How You'll Make an Impact on the Team • Own the compliance detection and rewrite model end-to-end: data, architecture, training, evaluation, and production, • Build the evaluation harness and labeled-data flywheel to prove model quality, • Optimize and balance accuracy, cost, and latency for production use, • Define and execute the path from frontier models to a smaller specialized model that matches or beats accuracy at lower cost and latency, • Build infrastructure for per-customer adaptation, including adapters and per-tenant tuning, • Translate plain-language policy into enforceable model behavior and document reasoning for model decisions, • Run focused error analysis on critical cases (missed violations and false positives)Here's What You'll Need to Be Successful in This Role, • 8+ years in applied ML or AI with models shipped and maintained in production, • Hands-on expertise in modern NLP and LLM techniques, including fine-tuning, distillation, and rigorous evaluation, • Strong judgment as a senior individual contributor who sets technical direction, • Deep instincts for model design tradeoffs (when to fine-tune vs. prompt, when to distill, when smaller models suffice), • Bias for shipping and measuring everything you deployHere's What Else Might Help You Out, • Experience transitioning systems from large general models to smaller specialized models for cost and latency, • Background in compliance, regtech, or other regulated domains, • Experience adapting one model to many customers (adapters, per-tenant tuning), • Public research, open source contributions, or technical writingPay Range $200,000 - $250,000/year Ready to Make Your Mark? This role may fill quickly. Submit your resume to be considered. Apply with Pioneers here