Senior Applied Scientist

About the Role

Join NinjaTech AI to develop the core intelligence for autonomous AI agents that not only respond to queries but also plan, reason, use tools, operate devices, collaborate with people, and perform complex tasks over extended periods. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will drive forward applied research in reinforcement learning, large language model (LLM) training, model optimization, natural language processing, and multimodal AI.

This position involves substantial hands-on work turning state-of-the-art research into scalable production systems. You will collaborate closely with the Chief Science Officer, engineering and product teams, ML engineers, and software developers, owning significant aspects of the models and systems powering Ninja.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct research, develop prototypes, train, assess, and deploy sophisticated ML and LLM technologies, emphasizing reinforcement learning and autonomous agent AI.
• Utilize advanced reinforcement learning techniques, including RLHF and similar methods, to enhance model reasoning, reliability, precision, and task execution.
• Create and manage extensive training and evaluation datasets, employing synthetic data generation, statistical modeling, and data-mining approaches.
• Train, fine-tune, condense, quantize, and optimize large language models for deployment in production settings.
• Develop high-efficiency multi-GPU pipelines for training and inference using contemporary acceleration and mixed-precision methods.
• Establish comprehensive evaluation frameworks and experimental setups to monitor model quality, behavior, and performance metrics.
• Design and execute experiments such as A/B testing to validate model improvements and product enhancements.
• Build scalable, reliable production machine learning systems and write clean, efficient code mainly using Python and Rust.
• Optimize algorithms and system performance for latency, throughput, memory use, and cost-effectiveness.
• Advance NinjaTech’s natural language and speech technology capabilities, including natural language understanding/generation, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text functionalities.
• Translate cutting-edge academic research into practical features that can be deployed for users.
• Continually assess emerging research, models, and techniques to identify opportunities for improving Ninja’s AI systems significantly.

Candidate Requirements

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering, or related quantitative discipline.
• Extensive experience in building complete machine learning or deep learning systems from data collection and experimentation through to training and production deployment.
• In-depth knowledge of machine learning, deep learning, probability, statistics, optimization, and algorithm design.
• Strong expertise in reinforcement learning methodologies such as PPO, actor-critic models, RLHF, or similar techniques.
• Practical experience in training, fine-tuning, evaluating, and deploying transformer-based language models.
• Advanced skills in Python programming; experience with Rust is highly desirable.
• Proficient with PyTorch and contemporary ML tools and libraries.
• Experience with distributed and multi-GPU training, mixed-precision computation, model distillation, quantization, ONNX, and inference performance optimization.
• Knowledge in domains including natural language understanding and generation, information retrieval, question answering, knowledge extraction, text classification, or speech and audio processing.
• Strong command of software architecture, data structures, algorithms, database systems, and runtime/performance diagnostics.
• Ability to fluidly transition between academic research and practical engineering—from experimental techniques to robust production implementations.
• Excellent analytical skills to independently tackle complex challenges, formulate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and make decisions based on evidence.

Additional Information

At NinjaTech AI, you will not just refine a small piece of an established system but play a pivotal role in shaping the foundational intelligence of an autonomous AI platform, transforming AI research breakthroughs into capabilities that impact real users.