Principal Applied Scientist, Small Language Models

• Top-tier medical dental and vision coverage
• 401(k)

You will own the small purpose-built language model that enforces compliance in real time ensuring messages are safe before they are 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).

• 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)

• 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 deploy

• 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 writing

$200000 - $250000/year

This role may fill quickly. Submit your resume to be considered.

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