Senior Research Scientist, Machine Learning

About the Company

Clarifai is a leading, full-lifecycle deep learning AI platform for computer vision, natural language processing, and audio recognition. We help organizations transform unstructured images, video, text, and audio data into structured data at a significantly faster and more accurate rate than humans would be able to do on their own. Founded in 2013 by Matt Zeiler, Ph.D. Clarifai has been a market leader in AI since winning the top five places in image classification at the 2013 ImageNet Challenge. Clarifai continues to grow with employees remotely based throughout the United States, Canada, Estonia, Argentina & India.

We have raised $100M in funding to date, with $60M coming from our most recent Series C, and are backed by industry leaders like Menlo Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital, New Enterprise Associates, LDV Capital, Corazon Capital, Google Ventures, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Osage.

Clarifai is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing, hiring, and retaining a diverse workforce.

The Opportunity

Note: We are interested in every qualified candidate who is eligible to work in the United States. However, we are not able to sponsor visas for this particular opportunity, as we are looking for someone who is eligible for a Secret or Top Secret Clearance

As a member of our Research Team, you will apply the latest academic insights to practical applications, pioneering solutions that shape the future of Clarifai’s AI platform. Your role involves pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in AI/ML today, transforming the latest academic research into practical, scalable solutions. Collaborating closely with our MLOps, Engineering, Professional Services, and Product teams, your work will not only enhance our existing products and have direct impact on our customers, but also pioneer new directions for Clarifai’s AI capabilities. Your deep learning expertise, particularly in CV, NLP, and multi-modal AI, will be crucial in driving our product innovation and strategic vision. You will keep up with state-of-the-art advances through continual learning, internal research projects, conference attendance, and collaboration with academic and industry partners.

We are looking for someone motivated by having their ideas and creations out in the world in the hands of users and who shares our excitement about the potential of AI/ML to positively transform our world. We value a collaborative, inclusive environment and seek those who are skilled at sharing knowledge inside and outside of Clarifai.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and participate in R&D initiatives in new research domains, particularly in CV, NLP, and multi-modal to augment Clarifai’s product capabilities and meet customers’ unique needs.
• Engage in rapid prototyping and experimental methodologies to fast-track innovation.
• Develop clear, maintainable code that can be adopted and extended by others.
• Adhere to best engineering practices, including source control management, code reviews, and test-driven development.
• Foster a collaborative and inclusive environment, sharing knowledge and insights within and beyond Clarifai.

Impact

As one of Clarifai’s Senior Research Scientists, your work will resonate throughout the developer and AI/ML communities, significantly influencing Clarifai’s market position and innovation trajectory. You will leverage cutting-edge machine learning tools and impart your deep learning expertise across the organization, driving our mission forward.

Requirements

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in neural network development, with a strong focus on computer vision and/or natural language processing.
• Experience with multiple imaging modalities 
• Expertise in  Python, as well as experience with libraries such as numpyy, pandas, scikit-learn, and matplotlib. Proficiency in PyTorch is required.
• Advanced degree (PhD/Masters) in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field.

Great to Have

• Has an Active Secret or Top Secret clearance, or eligibility to obtain such a clearance. 

• Previous projects developing  object detection, multi-object tracking, LLMs, LLM applications (chat, RAG, PEFT, etc.), and/or multi-modal models or applications (Captioning, VQA, cross-modal retrieval).
• Experience in other machine learning domains, such as audio/signal processing or synthetic aperture radar (SAR).
• Experience with the open source  AI/ML ecosystem such as Hugging Face, OpenMMLab, etc.
• Experience with government contracting
• Published research, especially in CV, NLM, and/or multi-modal AI.
• PhD in machine learning-related discipline.