Senior/Lead Research Engineer - AI/ML- Applied AI

About the Role

Key Responsibilities

• Design methods, tools and infrastructure to push the state of the art in large language models, integrating applied AI capabilities into FICO's analytics and decision management platform.
• Define research goals informed by practical engineering excellence and concerns.
• Design, analyze and execute scientific experiments to advance understanding of large language models.
• Contribute to experiments, including designing experimental details, writing reusable code, running evaluations, and organizing results.
• Conduct product-driven research and implement solutions in areas such as model architecture, algorithms, data processing, and optimizer development.
• Explore novel research topics for post-training foundation LLMs and align solutions with product strategy.
• Optimize and scale training infrastructure to improve efficiency and reliability.
• Adapt standard machine learning methods to exploit modern parallel environments like distributed clusters, multicore SMP, and GPU.

Requirements

• 8+ years experience in Machine Learning and Software Engineering with a demonstrated history of managing complex, large-scale projects.
• 4+ years of research experience in machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing.
• Experience developing machine learning models at scale from inception to business impact.
• Strong coding skills in Python and hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Jax, TensorFlow).
• Experience with Deep Learning models (e.g., DNN, LLM, etc.) training, data processing, and evaluation.
• Experience with architectural patterns of large-scale ML systems, and integrating AI/ML solutions with Large Language Models.
• Experience with embeddings and information retrieval; exposure to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures and familiarity with a vector database is preferred.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills with the ability to mentor teams and collaborate effectively across departments.
• Bachelor/Master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience with embeddings and information retrieval.
• Familiarity with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures and vector databases.

Qualifications

• Bachelor/Master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Benefits & Perks

• Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs that encourage you to bring your best every day and be recognized for doing so.
• An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events.
• The targeted base pay range for this role is: $137,000 to $215,000.