Staff GenAI Research Scientist

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.

Pay Range Transparency:

Databricks is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range(s) for this role is listed below and represents base salary range for non-commissionable roles or on-target earnings for commissionable roles. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to job-related skills, depth of experience, relevant certifications and training, and specific work location. Based on the factors above, Databricks utilizes the full width of the range. The total compensation package for this position may also include eligibility for annual performance bonus, equity, and the benefits listed above. For more information regarding which range your location is in visit our page here.

Local Pay Range:

$192,000—$260,000 USD