Principal Applied Scientist

Job Description

Job Description

Principal Applied Scientist

Full-time

New York City, NY, US

Exclusive confidential search — details shared with qualified applicants.

Benefits You'll Love

• Top-tier medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k)

Become a Key Player as a Principal Applied Scientist

You will own the deterministic enforcement layer that guarantees compliance before AI messages are sent, driving accuracy, cost, and latency tradeoffs. You will work as the senior individual contributor on this layer, collaborating directly with the founder and backend engineers to define technical direction. Hybrid (3 days onsite) in the New York City area.

Here's How You'll Make an Impact on the Team

• Own the deterministic detection and enforcement layer end to end: rule system, retrieval, matching logic, and production runtime
• Build the evaluation harness and labeled-data flywheel to demonstrate and improve accuracy
• Measure and optimize precision, recall, cost, and latency, and balance tradeoffs between them
• Define architecture direction for the deterministic layer alongside model and retrieval components
• Translate plain-language policy and regulation into deterministic rules and own the reasoning behind each decision
• Adapt rules to customer-specific policies, including per-tenant configuration
• Run tight error analysis on missed violations and false alarms to improve trust and performance

Here's What You'll Need to Be Successful in This Role

• 8+ years in applied ML, NLP, or high-accuracy detection systems with shipped production work
• Hands-on experience in information retrieval, entity recognition, pattern and rule design, and rigorous evaluation
• Proven judgment as a senior individual contributor who sets technical direction
• Strong instincts for when deterministic rules outperform models and how to push precision and recall
• Bias for shipping and for measuring outcomes of what you ship

Here's What Else Might Help You Out

• Experience in compliance, regtech, or other regulated domains
• Building high-precision/high-recall detection or classification systems (fraud, security, content moderation, etc.)
• Experience adapting a rule system to many customers (per-tenant policy/configuration)
• Experience combining deterministic and model-based components in production
• Public research, open source contributions, or technical writing

Pay Range

$200-$250K/year

Ready to Make Your Mark?

This role may fill quickly. Submit your resume to be considered.

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