LeadAppliedScientist

Lead Applied Scientist (12 Month Fixed Term Contract - Maternity Cover) Prolific is building the human data infrastructure that powers the next generation of AI systems. As frontier AI labs scale their use of human-generated data for training, evaluation, and alignment, the way we measure quality, performance, and operational efficiency becomes increasingly important. The Role As an Applied Scientist, you will design and prototype AI/ML methods that improve data quality, scale human judgement, and support robust AI evaluation workflows. You will work on applied problems such as quality modelling, judgement aggregation, evaluation design, LLM-assisted review, and reliability testing for AI systems. Ideal for someone with deep scientific judgement, strong applied ML skills, and a practical bias toward methods that work in real customer and product contexts. This is not a pure research role or a production ML engineering role. You will turn ambiguous problems into clear methodologies, benchmarks, models, and prototypes that product and engineering teams can adopt. What You'll Be Doing Prototype AI/ML methods to improve human data quality, judgement aggregation, and AI evaluation workflows. Design experiments, benchmarks, and reliability tests to measure whether new methods improve quality, efficiency, or customer outcomes. Apply classical ML, statistics, LLMs, and agentic techniques where they create practical value. Use modern AI tools to accelerate prototyping, experimentation, and iteration. Partner closely with product and engineering to translate scientific methods into scalable platform capabilities. Communicate technical assumptions, trade-offs, and recommendations clearly across technical and non-technical teams. What We are looking for PhD or MSc in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning, or a related field. 3+ years of applied ML, AI research, or data science experience with demonstrated real-world impact. Experience with human-in-the-loo