Applied ML Scientist
Applied ML Scientists design and optimize machine learning systems that solve concrete business or scientific problems, moving beyond theoretical research to ship models in production environments. They work at the intersection of modeling and systems engineering, combining cutting-edge techniques like fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and synthetic data generation with practical constraints around latency, cost, and real-world data distribution. These roles typically sit within dedicated applied research or product teams at AI-native companies, collaborating closely with engineers and domain experts to translate customer requirements or product challenges into effective training pipelines and evaluation frameworks.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Designing and implementing deep learning model architectures for specific problem domains
Training, fine-tuning, and optimizing machine learning models at scale
Building and deploying machine learning systems from research to production
Designing evaluation metrics, benchmarks, and test sets for model performance assessment
Analyzing and debugging machine learning system behavior in real-world applications
Identifying emerging research directions and implementing state-of-the-art techniques
Working with large-scale, multi-modal datasets including images, text, sensor data, and structured data
Writing production-grade code with testing, documentation, and version control practices
Performing empirical research to measure and understand real-world impact and behavior of AI systems
Managing and integrating multiple heterogeneous data sources and modalities
Optimizing model inference performance and computational efficiency for deployment constraints
Monitoring and maintaining machine learning systems in production environments
Designing and executing A/B tests and experimentation frameworks to validate model improvements
Applying domain knowledge from specialized fields such as biology, physics, or autonomous systems
Developing generative models including language models, vision models, and diffusion-based approaches
Implementing reinforcement learning techniques for model post-training and optimization
Building agentic systems and multi-agent AI workflows for autonomous task execution
Designing reward functions and training pipelines for language model alignment and behavior shaping
Conducting red-teaming and adversarial evaluation to identify AI safety risks and vulnerabilities
Collaborating with cross-functional teams including product managers, engineers, and domain experts
Translating domain-specific requirements and user feedback into machine learning objectives
Communicating complex technical findings and results to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
26 open Applied ML Scientist jobs across 16 companies.
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