Senior / Staff Machine Learning Research Scientist, Agents

Senior / Staff Machine Learning Research Scientist, Agents

San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; New York, NY

At Scale AI, our mission is to accelerate the development of AI applications. For 8 years, Scale has been the leading AI data foundry, helping fuel the most exciting advancements in AI, including: generative AI, defense applications, and autonomous vehicles. With our recent Series F round, we're accelerating the abundance of frontier data to pave the road to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and building upon our prior model evaluation work with enterprise customers and governments, to deepen our capabilities and offerings for both public and private evaluations.

The Agent Capabilities & Environments (ACE) team, part of Scale's Research organization, brings together customer-facing Researchers and Applied AI Engineers. Our core mission includes research on agent environments and RL reward signals, benchmarking autonomous agent performance across real-world scenarios and environments, creating robust data programs to improve Large Language Models (LLMs) agentic capabilities and building foundational tools and frameworks for evaluating models as agents. ACE focuses on autonomous agents that dynamically interact with diverse external environments, including code repositories, GUI interfaces, browsers, and more.

This role is at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and practical application, with a focus on studying the data types essential for building state-of-the-art agents, such as browser and SWE agents. The ideal candidate will explore the data landscape needed to advance intelligent, adaptable AI agents, guiding the data strategy at Scale to drive innovation. This position requires not only expertise in LLM agents and planning algorithms but also creativity in addressing novel challenges related to data, interaction, and evaluation. You will contribute to impactful research publications on agents, collaborate with customer researchers, and work alongside the engineering team to translate these advancements into real-world, scalable solutions.

Ideally you'd have:

• Practical experience working with LLMs, with proficiency in frameworks like Pytorch, Jax, or Tensorflow. You should also be adept at interpreting research literature and quickly turning new ideas into prototypes.
• A track record of published research in top ML venues (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, COLM, etc.)
• At least three years of experience addressing sophisticated ML problems, either in a research setting or product development.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to operate cross-functionally.

Nice to have:

• Hands-on experience with open source LLM fine-tuning or involvement in bespoke LLM fine-tuning projects using Pytorch/Jax.
• Hands-on experience and publications in building applications and evaluations related to AI agents such as tool-use, text2SQL, browser agents, coding agents and GUI agents.
• Hands-on experience with agent frameworks such as OpenHands, Swarm, LangGraph, etc.
• Familiarity with agentic reasoning methods such as STaR and PLANSEARCH
• Experience working with cloud technology stack (eg. AWS or GCP) and developing machine learning models in a cloud environment.

Our research interviews are crafted to assess candidates' skills in practical ML prototyping and debugging, their grasp of research concepts, and their alignment with our organizational culture. We will not ask any LeetCode-style questions.

Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of several career levels at Scale; it will be determined during the interview process based on work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and relevant education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. You'll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.

Please reference the job posting's subtitle for where this position will be located. For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time position in the locations of San Francisco, New York, Seattle is:

$302,400 - $378,000 USD

Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.

At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.

We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at View email address on click.appcast.io. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.

We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision.

We collect, retain and use personal data for our professional business purposes, including notifying you of job opportunities that may be of interest and sharing with our affiliates. We limit the personal data we collect to that which we believe is appropriate and necessary to manage applicants' needs, provide our services, and comply with applicable laws. Any information we collect in connection with your application will be treated in accordance with our internal policies and programs designed to protect personal data. Please see our privacy policy for additional information.