PrincipalAIResearchEngineer

## What You'll Do Define and drive the research roadmap for core AI capabilities spanning LLMs, ASR/speech understanding, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic systems. Design, train, fine-tune, and evaluate state-of-the-art models, taking them from prototype to robust, production-grade systems. Lead the architecture of scalable training and inference pipelines that operate reliably on real customer-scale data. Establish rigorous evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and quality bars for model performance, safety, and reliability. Partner closely with product, platform, and ML engineering teams to ship research into customer-facing features. Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, set technical standards, and act as a force multiplier across the AI org. Stay ahead of the field, evaluate emerging techniques, and represent Level AI's technical work externally where appropriate. ## What You'll Bring Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent research experience; typically 6+ years applying ML/AI in production settings. Deep expertise in modern deep learning, with strong command of LLMs, transformers, and at least one of speech/ASR, NLP, information retrieval, or multimodal modeling. A track record of taking research from idea to deployed, scaled product—not just publications, but shipped impact. Expert-level proficiency in Python and a major deep learning framework (PyTorch preferred), with strong software engineering fundamentals. Hands-on experience training and serving large models, including distributed training, optimization, and efficient inference. Demonstrated technical leadership: setting direction, mentoring engineers, and influencing across teams. Clear communicator able to convey complex technical ideas to both research and product audiences. ## Nice to Have Experience in conversational AI, contact center, or speech analytics domains. Publications at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, Interspeech) or significa