AI Scientist — Commerce Labs

100 Salesforce, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 149,000 - 224,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce is seeking an AI Scientist to design, prototype, and ship machine learning systems powering our agentic commerce products. You will work with research and product engineering to move ideas from whiteboard to production using real customer data.

Expect hands-on ML work with Python and tools like PyTorch, TensorFlow, and JAX, plus collaboration across teams to deliver scalable ML features for Commerce Cloud.

Qualifications

• Hands-on ML experience, training and evaluating models.
• Proficiency in Python and standard ML tooling (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
• PhD in Applied Science, ML, EE, CS, OR, or related field preferred.

Responsibilities

• Design, prototype, and ship ML systems powering agentic commerce products.
• Run end-to-end applied research experiments from framing to evaluation.
• Collaborate with Commerce Cloud eng, product, and researchers to translate results into shipped features.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

Reinforcement learning

Deep learning

Optimization

Causal inference

Operations research

GitHub

Education

PhD (completed or in progress)

Tools

GitHub

Job description

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts. Job Category Software Engineering Job Details

About Salesforce

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isnt a buzzword - its a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we're looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all. Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? Youre in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce. The Experience Commerce Labs is where Salesforce works on the future of commerce. We build agentic systems that learn efficiently over time from real interactions with customers, merchants, and the marketplace environment, pushing the boundary of what autonomous commerce agents can do at enterprise scale. Commerce Labs builds on top of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Salesforce's unified commerce platform that powers storefronts, checkout, order management, and merchandising for enterprise brands and retailers around the world. Commerce Cloud handles massive scale and complexity, including high-traffic storefronts, peak shopping events, multi-channel selling, and deep integration with the broader Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem (Service, Marketing, Data Cloud, and more). This gives Commerce Labs a unique advantage: our agentic research isnt theoretical, its grounded in real production traffic, real merchant data, and real customer behavior at scale, so what we build can go straight into the hands of the retailers who run their businesses on Commerce Cloud. We're hiring an AI Scientist to design, prototype, and ship machine learning (ML) systems that power our agentic commerce products. You'll work closely with research and product engineering to take ideas from whiteboard to production, with real customers and real-world data, and with direct line of sight into how your work shows up in Commerce Cloud storefronts.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Shopper Agents: Assist customers and answer engines in finding the products they need across Commerce Cloud storefronts.
• Merchant Agents: Help retailers automatically run their storefronts, from merchandising to promotions.
• Smart Infrastructure: Automated bot detection and order management that help the enterprise run efficiently at Commerce Cloud scale.

Design and build agentic ML systems that learn from ongoing interaction with users and environments, not just static datasets. Run applied research experiments end-to-end, from problem framing and data analysis to model design, training, and evaluation. Prototype quickly and iterate: build hands-on proofs of concept, then help harden the most promising ones for production on Commerce Cloud. Collaborate with Commerce Cloud engineering, product, and other researchers to translate research results into shipped features. Stay current with the latest developments in ML and AI research and evaluate their applicability to commerce problems. Communicate findings clearly through internal writeups, demos, and, where relevant, external publications.

You're Our Person If…

• You have hands-on machine learning experience, meaning you've built, trained, and evaluated ML models yourself, not just directed others.
• You have a strong foundation in one or more of: reinforcement learning (RL), deep learning, optimization, causal inference, or operations research.
• You're proficient in Python and standard ML tooling (for example, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
• You have strong problem-solving skills and comfort working with ambiguous, open-ended problems.
• You're comfortable moving fast from idea to working prototype.

Even Better If…

• You have a PhD (completed or in progress) in Applied Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Operations Research, or a related field.
• You have a strong record of published basic or applied AI research, for example at top-tier conferences or journals such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, CVPR, RecSys, EC, EMNLP, ACL, or equivalent.
• You have experience with agentic or multi-step decision-making systems, such as RL agents, large language model (LLM) based agents, or sequential decision-making.
• You have prior experience applying ML to commerce, marketplaces, recommendation systems, or fraud and bot detection.
• You're familiar with e-commerce platforms or large-scale retail and commerce systems, such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, Adobe Commerce, or similar.
• You have open-source contributions or a public body of work, for example on GitHub or Google Scholar.

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you'll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best, and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best. Together, we'll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love.

Accommodations

If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please submit a request via this Accommodations Request Form. Please note that Salesforce uses artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help our recruiters assess and evaluate candidates' resumes and qualifications throughout the recruiting process. Humans will always make any candidate selection and hiring decisions. Please see our Candidate Privacy Statement for more information about how we use your personal data and your rights, including with regard to use of AI tools and opt out options.

Posting Statement

Salesforce is an equal opportunity employer and maintains a policy of non-discrimination with all employees and applicants for employment. What does that mean exactly? It means that at Salesforce, we believe in equality for all. And we believe we can lead the path to equality in part by creating a workplace that's inclusive, and free from discrimination. Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal. Any employee or potential employee will be assessed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications - without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, transgender status, age, disability, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other classifications protected by law. This policy applies to current and prospective employees, no matter where they are in their Salesforce employment journey. It also applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, assessment of job performance, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit. The same goes for compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, reduction in workforce, recall, training, and education. In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program. More details about company benefits can be found at the following link: https://www.salesforcebenefits.com. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Salesforce will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. At Salesforce, we believe everyone can be a Trailblazer. Join Salesforce and discover a future of new opportunities.

Salary: The typical base salary range for this position is $148,500 - $223,900 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $178,900 - $246,000 annually.