AI Research Scientist

AI Scientist

U.S. Bank is seeking an AI Scientist to join the Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence (AI CoE), a high-impact organization responsible for advancing the bank's AI strategy through applied research, innovation, rapid prototyping, and enterprise deployment.

This role is ideal for a highly technical and hands-on AI practitioner who thrives at the intersection of research, experimentation, and implementation. The successful candidate will continuously evaluate emerging advances in artificial intelligence, identify opportunities to create business value, rapidly prototype novel solutions, and help evolve successful concepts into scalable enterprise capabilities.

Unlike traditional data science roles, this position spans the full AI research and development lifecycle. The ideal candidate combines strong scientific and engineering expertise with a practical mindset, enabling them to move seamlessly from exploratory research and experimentation to the development and deployment of production-grade AI solutions.

The candidate is expected to remain actively engaged with the broader AI community, stay current on academic and industry developments, and contribute to advancing AI innovation within the bank.

Key Responsibilities

AI Research & Innovation

• Monitor, evaluate, and experiment with emerging AI technologies, research breakthroughs, and industry trends, with particular emphasis on generative AI, large language models (LLMs), multimodal AI, and agentic AI systems.
• Identify opportunities to apply advanced AI techniques to complex business problems across financial services.
• Conduct original AI research and exploratory investigations to assess the feasibility and value of novel approaches.
• Develop hypotheses, design experiments, evaluate results, and communicate findings to technical and business stakeholders.
• Contribute to patents, technical publications, whitepapers, prototypes, and innovation initiatives.

Prototyping & Solution Development

• Rapidly transform research concepts into working prototypes and proof-of-concepts.
• Design, develop, and validate AI solutions across the full lifecycle, from data preparation and modeling through deployment and monitoring.
• Build experimental and production-ready solutions using modern AI/ML tools, frameworks, and cloud platforms.
• Apply best practices in model evaluation, benchmarking, explainability, security, and responsible AI.

Generative AI & Agentic Systems

• Develop solutions leveraging foundation models, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), fine-tuning techniques, and agentic workflows.
• Design and evaluate AI agents, multi-agent systems, orchestration frameworks, tool-use architectures, memory systems, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Contribute to best practices for prompt engineering, model adaptation, evaluation, observability, and governance of LLM-based systems.
• Assess emerging model architectures and determine their applicability within a highly regulated environment.

Deployment & Technical Collaboration

• Partner with software engineers, platform teams, product managers, and business stakeholders to transition successful prototypes into production environments.
• Contribute to deployment and operationalization efforts for AI solutions.
• Help balance innovation, scalability, security, compliance, and operational requirements throughout solution development.
• Share knowledge and provide technical guidance to peers and junior team members.
• Take ownership of assigned initiatives and ensure successful delivery of AI capabilities from concept through deployment.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field such as statistics, computer science, engineering or applied mathematics, or equivalent work experience
• Eight or more years of relevant experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Computational Linguistics, or a related field strongly preferred.
• Deep expertise in machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, transformer architectures, and foundation models.
• Experience with generative AI technologies, including LLMs, fine-tuning, RAG systems, model evaluation, and inference optimization.
• Experience building and evaluating agentic AI systems, multi-agent workflows, AI orchestration frameworks, and autonomous decision-making architectures.
• Hands-on experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face, LangChain, LangGraph, or equivalent AI ecosystems.
• Demonstrated record of innovation through publications, patents, open-source contributions, conference presentations, or impactful AI solution delivery.
• Experience developing AI solutions within highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, insurance, or telecommunications.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to translate complex AI concepts into actionable business outcomes.

Location Expectations: This role requires working from a U.S. Bank location three (3) or more days per week

If there's anything we can do to accommodate a disability during any portion of the application or hiring process, please refer to our disability accommodations for applicants.

Benefits:

• Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)
• Basic term and optional term life insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability
• Pregnancy disability and parental leave
• 401(k) and employer-funded retirement plan
• Paid vacation (from two to five weeks depending on salary grade and tenure)
• Up to 11 paid holiday opportunities
• Adoption assistance
• Sick and Safe Leave accruals of one hour for every 30 worked, up to 80 hours per calendar year unless otherwise provided by law

U.S. Bank is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, religion, color, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or veteran status, and other factors protected under applicable law.

The salary range reflects figures based on the primary location, which is listed first. The actual range for the role may differ based on the location of the role. In addition to salary, U.S. Bank offers a comprehensive benefits package, including incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase 401(k) contribution and pension (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). Pay Range: $133,365.00 - $156,900.00

U.S. Bank will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment. U.S. Bank conducts background checks consistent with applicable local laws, including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance and the California Fair Chance Act as well as the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Applicants must be able to comply with U.S. Bank policies and procedures including the Code of Ethics and Business Conduct and related workplace conduct and safety policies.

Posting may be closed earlier due to high volume of applicants.