Staff GenAI Research Scientist

Company Description

At Databricks, we are obsessed with enabling data teams to solve the world’s toughest problems, from security threat detection to cancer drug development. We do this by building and running the world’s best data and AI platform, so our customers can focus on the high value challenges that are central to their own missions.

The Mosaic AI organization enables companies to develop AI models and systems using their own data, with technologies ranging from pre-training LLMs from scratch to augmented generation using the latest retrieval techniques. Mosaic AI does so by producing novel science and putting it into production. Mosaic AI is committed to the belief that a company’s AI models are just as valuable as any other core IP, and that high-quality AI models should be available to all.

Job Description

As a Research Scientist on the Mosaic AI Team at Databricks, you will be responsible for keeping up with the latest developments in deep learning and advancing the scientific frontier by creating new techniques that go beyond the state of the art. You will work together on a collaborative team of researchers with diverse backgrounds and technical training. And most importantly, you will love our customers: our goal is to make our customers successful in applying state-of-the-art LLMs and AI systems, and we encode our scientific expertise into our products to make that possible.

You might be a good fit if you…

• Have 2+ years of full time experience in an industry research lab or equivalent academic experience.
• Have produced novel research related to topics of practical importance in contemporary AI, such as training generative AI models like LLMs and text-to-image models, improving upon pre-trained models, evaluating these models, etc.
• Have specialized expertise in topics like fine-tuning, RLHF, LLM tool-use, etc.
• Are comfortable working with large-scale LLMs in the 10s to 100s of billions of parameters.
• Have strong foundations in software engineering and empirical research.
• Are passionate about getting your work into the hands of real users and – more broadly – democratizing access to modern AI technology.
• Have strong communication skills and a desire to work on a small, fast-paced team.

A PhD is NOT required for this role. We are open to hiring candidates with bachelor’s and master’s degrees and to new graduates. We are open to hiring candidates who are currently in “research engineer” roles at other companies.

Your Responsibilities

• Keeping up to date with the research literature and thinking beyond the state of the art to address the needs of our users.
• Developing and implementing methods that improve training efficiency and extend or improve model capabilities, reliability, and safety.