Principal Applied Scientist Enterprise AI

Chevron is accepting online applications for the position Principal Applied Scientist - Enterprise AIthrough January 20 2026 at 11:59 p.m. (Central Time).

Join Chevrons Enterprise AI team to lead the design and delivery of industry specific foundation models and agentic AI systems that transform decision making and underpin the strategy for future growth for the company. As a Principal Applied Scientist you will architect and advance the AI foundation for Chevrons proprietary data and workflows.

This role is ideal for senior scientists who blend deep domain expertise in energy with state-of-the-art ML/GenAI methods. You will also set technical direction mentor multidisciplinary teams and build reusable frameworks and analytical assets to accelerate Chevrons AI ambitions at global scale.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect Industry Foundation Models
  Design domain tailored FMs for energy workflows (e.g. subsurface production operations supply & trading) leveraging new and emerging FM architectures and advanced methods such as instruction tuning LoRA adapter based finetuning prompt optimization and RLHF/RLAIF.

• Fine Tune & Optimize Model Weights
  Own the end to end process for weight initialization adaptation quantization distillation and evaluation to meet accuracy latency and cost targets; establish best practices for versioning reproducibility and model cards.

• Develop & Operationalize AI Systems
  Build test and deploy production grade models and agentic workflows using AzureML Azure OpenAI Service and Databricks (Unity Catalog & Model Serving); maintain flexibility to integrate approved third party platform and/or model endpoints via Azure where appropriate e.g. DataRobot

• Establish Reusable AI Frameworks
  Create modular reusable componentsfeature stores orchestration pipelines evaluation harnesses prompt/agent templates and retrieval layersthat accelerate delivery across multiple AI applications.

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship
  Provide deep technical guidance to data scientists AI engineers and software engineers; lead design reviews code reviews and drive adoption of best practices for scalable AI.

• Collaborate Across Disciplines
  Partner with business stakeholders and cross functional engineering delivery teams to translate complex problems into measurable scalable AI solutions and to embed models into production systems and agentic workflows.

• Model Lifecycle & Responsible AI
  Work alongside Chevrons Data & Insights Department to define standards for governance monitoring drift detection retraining and evaluation (offline/online); champion fairness transparency safety and auditability across the model lifecycle.

• Innovation & Thought Leadership
  Lead research and experiments on foundation models multimodal learning retrieval augmented generation and reinforcement learning; publish findings internally and externally where appropriate.

Required Qualifications:

• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in computer science statistics mathematics neurosciences machine learning engineering or related quantitative field
• 10 years building and deploying enterprise-scale AI/ML systems including technical leadership of complex initiatives
• Demonstrated expertise in foundation models and open-source LLM/SLM ecosystems including fine-tuning weight management and evaluation.
• Strong proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks (PyTorch TensorFlow Hugging Face).
• Hands-on experience with AzureML Azure OpenAI Service and Databricks.
• Deep domain understanding of energy workflows (upstream downstream or supply & trading) and the ability to encode domain insights into model design
• Excellent communication cross-functional collaboration and the ability to set technical strategy and mentor teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with multimodal FMs (text time-series tabular vision) and RAG systems.
• Experience with agentic AI architectures generative AI and reinforcement learning
• Familiarity with MLOps CI/CD for ML model serving experiment tracking and online evaluation.
• Demonstrated background in optimization methods causal inference or simulation/agent-based modelling for decision support.
• Demonstrated experience in distributed model training on multi-GPU and multi-node clusters and ability to optimize and troubleshoot training across a cluster to ensure efficient utilization of resources and consistent model performance
• Record of technical publications patents or conference presentations in AI/ML.

Relocation Options:

Relocation may be considered.

International Considerations:

Expatriate assignments will not be considered.

Chevron regrets that it is unable to sponsor employment Visas or consider individuals on time-limited Visa status for this position.

U.S. Regulatory notice:

Chevron is an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religious creed sex (including pregnancy) sexual orientation gender identity gender expression national origin or ancestry age mental or physical disability medical condition reproductive health decision-making military or veteran status political preference marital status citizenship genetic information or other characteristics protected by applicable law.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation please email us at .

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