AI research scientist

WRITER is where the worlds leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And were proving its possible through powerful trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITERs end-to-end platform hundreds of companies like Mars Marriott Uber and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their companys data and fueled by WRITERs enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest Radical Ventures and ICONIQ Growth WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI.

Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco New York City Austin Chicago and London our team thinks big and moves fast and were looking for smart hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI.

AI research at WRITER isnt just about publishing papers its about building the scientific foundation that powers some of the most ambitious enterprise AI deployments in the world. As an AI research scientist youll be at the center of that work. Youll drive a high-impact research agenda focused on large language models agentic reasoning and the system-level capabilities that make AI genuinely useful at enterprise scale. This is a rare opportunity to do research that matters twice over advancing the field and shipping directly into products used by hundreds of thousands of people every day.

Were at an inflection point. Enterprises are moving from experimenting with AI to deeply embedding it across their operations and WRITERs models are the engine making that possible. The work you do here on post-training planning multi-step reasoning and agentic workflows will directly shape how the next generation of enterprise AI behaves performs and scales. Youll have the resources infrastructure and cross-functional support to pursue ambitious ideas and bring them to life quickly.

This role is hybrid based out of our San Francisco or New York City hub. Youll report to our VP of AI research.

*Please note: role is open to Senior Staff and Sr. Staff applicants

• Lead an independent high-impact research agenda on large language models and agentic systems owning projects from early hypothesis through model training evaluation and production deployment

• Design and execute large-scale post-training experiments using supervised fine-tuning reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) RLAIF DPO and emerging alignment techniques with a focus on improving multi-step reasoning planning and tool use in enterprise agentic workflows

• Build novel evaluation benchmarks and methodologies that push beyond existing limitations establishing rigorous measures for how well models perform on complex real-world enterprise tasks

• Develop scalable data synthesis and curation pipelines that generate the high-quality training signal driving model improvement including LLM-as-judge frameworks synthetic data generation and adversarial dataset construction

• Shape WRITERs model architecture and training roadmap by translating your research insights into concrete improvements to our enterprise-grade LLMs working hand-in-hand with research engineering and product teams

• Publish and present original research at top-tier venues NeurIPS ICLR ICML ACL and others representing WRITER at the frontier of the field and contributing to the broader scientific community

• Mentor and uplevel fellow researchers and engineers on the team helping set a high bar for scientific rigor experimental design and research culture

• 7 years of hands-on ML research experience with deep expertise in large language model pre-training and post-training youve trained models at scale debugged distributed jobs and shipped improvements that made a measurable difference

• A Ph.D. in Computer Science Machine Learning NLP or a related field or equivalent demonstrated research experience with a strong portfolio of independent published work

• Expert-level knowledge of post-training methods including SFT RLHF RLAIF DPO GRPO and related alignment and reasoning techniques with a track record of applying them to real production-grade systems

• Strong command of Python and PyTorch (or JAX) with the engineering depth to build and scale training pipelines evaluation infrastructure and data synthesis workflows yourself not just direct others to do it

• A meaningful publication record at competitive ML/AI venues (NeurIPS ICLR ICML ACL EMNLP or equivalent) evidencing your ability to originate ideas and execute on a multi-month research agenda independently

• Hands-on experience designing or evaluating agentic systems models that plan reason through multi-step tasks use tools and recover gracefully from errors with a nuanced understanding of where they break and how to fix them

• The instincts and orientation that match WRITERs values: you Connect you collaborate openly across research engineering and product and communicate complex ideas with clarity to both technical and non-technical audiences; you Challenge you ask the hard questions push back on conventional wisdom and pursue the research directions others havent tried yet; you Own you drive your projects end-to-end with urgency take accountability for results and care deeply about the impact your work has on real customers

Benefits & perks (US Full-time employees)

• Generous PTO plus company holidays

• Medical dental and vision coverage for you and your family

• Paid parental leave for all parents (16 weeks)

• Fertility and family planning support

• Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri

• Flexible spending account and dependent FSA options

• Health savings account for eligible plans with company contribution

• Annual work-life stipends for:

  • Wellness stipend for gym massage/chiropractor personal training etc.

  • Learning and development stipend

• Company-wide off-sites and team off-sites

• Competitive compensation company stock options and 401k

WRITER is an equal-opportunity employer and is committed to diversity. We dont make hiring or employment decisions based on race color religion creed gender national origin age disability veteran status marital status pregnancy sex gender expression or identity sexual orientation citizenship or any other basis protected by applicable local state or federal law. Under the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By submitting your application on the application page you acknowledge and agree to WRITERs Global Candidate Privacy Notice.

Required Experience:

IC