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Director, AI Research

AMD· Engineering
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Santa Clara, California$246.4k - $369.6kFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Director of AI Research to lead and set a research agenda at the intersection of frontier AI and AMD silicon, building and guiding a team to translate research into tangible impact on AMD products, hardware roadmap, and platforms.

Responsibilities

  • Define and own a coherent AI research agenda spanning reinforcement learning, model training and optimization, and AI-for-systems, aligned to AMD's strategic priorities
  • Build, lead, and mentor a high-caliber team of AI researchers and research engineers; set research direction, hiring bar, and standards for technical excellence
  • Prioritize across competing research opportunities and focus the team on the work with the highest leverage for AMD
  • Ensure research translates into impact—influencing the hardware and software roadmap, improving model performance on AMD platforms, and strengthening external partnerships
  • Partner deeply across silicon, architecture, compiler, and software teams, and with external labs and collaborators, to ground research in real problems and real deployment
  • Build the evaluation, infrastructure, and verification practices that make research results trustworthy and reproducible
  • Set and track measurable goals for the research program—verifiable technical milestones, model and workload performance, and roadmap influence
  • Represent AMD's research agenda to executive leadership and to external partners; communicate results, trade-offs, and direction to both technical and business audiences
  • Attract, hire, and develop top AI research talent, and help build AMD's reputation as a destination for serious AI research
  • Stay at the frontier of AI research and translate emerging techniques into opportunity for AMD

Qualifications

  • PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent research experience and demonstrated impact
  • Demonstrated technical leadership in AI/ML research, with a strong track record of impactful published work and/or research shipped into production or frontier models
  • Deep, current expertise in one or more core areas—reinforcement learning, large-scale model training, AI-for-systems, or AI performance optimization—with the breadth to lead across several
  • Experience leading research teams and setting technical direction across multiple concurrent programs
  • Strong understanding of the hardware–software stack underpinning large-model training and inference
  • Ability to remain hands-on with training pipelines, research prototyping, or systems work while leading a team
  • Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence executives, partners, and engineers across organizational boundaries
  • Track record of attracting, hiring, and developing top AI research talent

Skills

Required:AI research leadershipReinforcement learningLarge-scale model trainingAI-for-systemsHardware–software understandingLeadership and people management

Benefits

  • AMD benefits at a glance (referenced in posting)
Last updated Oct 15, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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AMD delivers leadership high-performance and adaptive computing solutions to advance data center AI, AI PCs, intelligent edge devices, gaming, & beyond.

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