Lead AI Scientist

Role overview

Lead AI Scientist at Cornerstone OnDemand

We are looking for a Lead AI Scientist to drive the research, development, and deployment of advanced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions across the organization.

The ideal candidate combines strong scientific thinking with hands-on engineering capabilities and can take AI ideas from research and experimentation through production deployment and continuous optimization.

In This Role You Will

Responsibilities

• Design and develop LLM, Generative AI, RAG, NLP, recommendation, personalization, and agentic AI solutions.
• Design training, fine-tuning, evaluation, and inference pipelines for AI models.
• Build prototypes and proof-of-concepts and transition successful approaches into production systems.
• Design and implement model evaluation frameworks, including automated, human, and LLM-based evaluation.
• Publish internal research, technical documentation, patents, or external research papers where appropriate.

Employment details

• Research publications, patents, or contributions to open-source AI projects. #LI-Onsite
• Location: Hyderabad [India]

Application details

• Apply techniques such as transformer architectures, LLM fine-tuning, RAG, embeddings, vector search, deep learning, reinforcement learning, contextual bandits, and information retrieval.

Additional role details

• The role will focus on solving complex business and product problems using modern AI techniques, including Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), NLP, recommendation systems, deep learning, reinforcement learning, and agentic AI.
• Research and evaluate state-of-the-art AI/ML techniques and determine their applicability to business problems.
• Develop and fine-tune foundation models, domain-specific models, embedding models, and task-specific models.
• Develop experimentation frameworks and establish metrics for model quality, relevance, accuracy, robustness, latency, and cost.
• Investigate model behavior through experimentation, error analysis, ablation studies, and statistical analysis.
• Collaborate with Software Engineering, Product, Data Engineering, and Platform teams to productionize AI solutions.
• Optimize models and AI systems for accuracy, scalability, latency, memory, and inference cost.
• Stay current with advances in AI research and translate relevant research into practical solutions.
• You've Got What It Takes If You Have
• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
• 7+ years of experience in AI/ML, Data Science, or a closely related field.
• Strong understanding of machine learning and deep learning fundamentals.
• Strong hands-on experience with Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience developing and deploying machine learning models at scale.
• Strong experience with one or more of Generative AI/LLMs, NLP, recommendation systems, information retrieval, deep learning, reinforcement learning, or computer vision.
• Experience with transformer architectures and modern foundation models.
• Experience with model fine-tuning, embeddings, vector databases, RAG, and LLM evaluation.
• Strong understanding of experimentation, statistical modeling, model evaluation, and hypothesis testing.
• Experience working with large-scale datasets and distributed computing frameworks such as Spark.
• Strong analytical, communication, and problem-solving skills.
• Extra Dose of Awesome If You Have
• Experience with foundation models such as Llama, Mistral, Gemini, or comparable models.
• Experience with Hugging Face, LangChain/LangGraph, FAISS, Milvus, Weaviate, or similar AI technologies.
• Experience with model optimization techniques such as quantization, distillation, pruning, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT/LoRA).
• Experience designing production-grade AI platforms and services.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, cloud AI/ML platforms, and MLOps.
• Experience with MLflow or similar experiment and model management platforms.
• Experience with AI evaluation frameworks and LLM-as-a-Judge approaches.