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Principal AI Research Scientist, Research Director - AI Scaling

Databricks
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Hybrid (Mountain View, San Francisco)$270k - $340kFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Principal Research Scientist – AI Scaling leading a multidisciplinary team to advance large-scale ML, focusing on post-training, RL and inference efficiency, optimization, and scaling within Databricks AI.

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 aligning 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 efficiency, 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 a culture of 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 generative AI/LLMs/distributed ML systems/model optimization/responsible AI with emphasis on scaling and efficiency.
  • Hands-on leadership with strong programming skills in Python and PyTorch for research implementation.
  • Ability to translate research into scalable product capabilities in partnership with product and engineering teams.
  • Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.

Skills

Required:Team leadership and mentorshipFoundation model efficiencyPythonPyTorchResearch roadmap and strategy
Nice to have:Distributed ML systems
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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