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Principal Research Scientist – Scaling

Databricks
Apply on company site
San Francisco, CA$280k - $350kfull-timePosted 6mo ago

About the role

Role leading a scaling-focused research program at Databricks AI, directing a multidisciplinary team to advance large-scale ML/LLM efficiency, training, and inference, with close collaboration to product and engineering to deliver production-ready capabilities.

Responsibilities

  • Lead and grow a multidisciplinary research team focused on foundational and applied AI problems, with emphasis on LLM scaling, efficiency, and systems performance.
  • Define the scaling research roadmap aligned with strategic objectives, prioritizing foundation model efficiency and large-scale training/inference.
  • Drive algorithmic innovations for large-scale neural network training and inference, including novel optimizers, low-precision techniques, and model adaptation methods, with rigorous empirical validation.
  • Optimize end-to-end ML systems for distributed training and RL, memory and compute efficiency, in collaboration with core systems and platform teams.
  • Partner with product and engineering to translate research breakthroughs into customer-impacting capabilities in the Databricks AI platform.
  • Foster scientific excellence, reproducible experimentation, and knowledge sharing across Databricks AI.
  • Represent Databricks AI research externally through publications, talks, and collaborations, focusing on optimization and efficiency for large-scale models.
  • Mentor and develop talent, providing technical guidance and career development support for researchers and engineers.

Qualifications

  • Proven ability to lead a research team to develop novel techniques for foundation model efficiency with industry impact.
  • Deep expertise in at least one: generative AI, LLMs, distributed ML systems, model optimization, or responsible AI, with a focus on scaling and efficiency.
  • Hands-on leadership with strong programming skills in Python and PyTorch for research implementation.
  • Experience translating research into scalable product capabilities with product/engineer collaboration.
  • Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management.

Skills

Required:Leadership of research teamsFoundation model efficiencyPythonPyTorchResearch-to-product translationCommunication and stakeholder management

Benefits

  • Benefit details are available via the linked documents; region-specific benefits are provided by Databricks.
Last updated Sep 10, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Databricks

Leading Data and AI Platform for Enterprises

Databricks offers a unified platform for data, analytics and AI. Build better AI with a data-centric approach. Simplify ETL, data warehousing, governance and AI on the Data Intelligence Platform.

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