Applied AI Scientist

Demandbase; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Up to 100% paid Medical and Vision premiums

Flexible PTO policy

Paid holidays

Access to mental health resources

401(k) options

Short-term and long-term disability

Job summary

A leading tech company in San Francisco is seeking an experienced AI Scientist to enhance AI features that improve customer outcomes. In this senior-level role, you will focus on NLP, information retrieval, and applied machine learning to design smarter orchestration frameworks. The position requires 7+ years of relevant experience and strong coding abilities. Comprehensive benefits include medical coverage and flexible PTO. The company values diversity and inclusion, fostering a supportive work environment for all candidates.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in NLP, information retrieval, and applied machine learning.
• Strong coding ability and familiarity with production codebases.
• Experience with knowledge graphs or entity resolution.

Responsibilities

• Design approaches for grounding and context assembly.
• Develop and iterate on knowledge context graphs.
• Partner closely with engineering teams.

Skills

NLP

Information retrieval

Applied ML

Orchestration frameworks

Statistics and experimentation

Collaborative mindset

Communication skills

Job description

About the Role

We’re hiring an AI Scientist to help us build the next generation of AI features that show up directly in the product and improve customer outcomes. You’ll work on reasoning, planning, context and knowledge engineering problems, design the “brains” behind how our system finds the right context, and make our orchestration smarter and more reliable. This is a senior individual contributor role (IC5 / Staff Data Scientist level). You’ll be a peer to other senior technical leaders and a close partner to product and engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design approaches for grounding and context assembly (retrieval pipelines, context selection, query understanding).
• Improve AI orchestration and reasoning quality across multi-step workflows (tool use, routing, decomposition, evaluation).
• Develop and iterate on knowledge context graphs or other structured representations that help the system reason over accounts, people, and activity.
• Partner closely with engineering teams to translate prototypes into reliable, production-ready product capabilities.
• Raise technical rigor within the team by sharing patterns, mentoring others, and accelerating decision‑making processes.
• Partner with engineering to turn prototypes into reliable product capabilities. You won’t need to be a full‑time SWE, but you should be comfortable writing real code that holds up.

Qualifications

Core Experience & Technical Background

• Deep Domain Expertise: 7+ years of relevant experience (or equivalent depth) in NLP, information retrieval, ranking, applied ML, and agentic application architecture and design.
• Experience with Knowledge Graphs, entity resolution, or representation learning.
• Experience building systems that operate at scale, specifically regarding latency, reliability, and monitoring.
• Prior work on orchestration frameworks, agentic workflows, or multi‑step reasoning systems.
• A strong background in one or more of the following areas:
  • LLM Applications: Practical experience with grounding, RAG‑style systems, tool use, and routing, planning.
  • Query Understanding: Experience with intent modeling.
  • Search and Retrieval: Including lexical, semantic, hybrid retrieval, and reranking.
• Strong coding ability and comfort working with production codebases.
• Solid grounding in statistics and experimentation, including offline evaluations, A/B testing, and causal thinking.

Execution & Soft Skills

• Problem‑Solving: The ability to take a nebulous problem, create structure, build something testable, and iterate.
• Collaborative Mindset: Comfortable acting as the "glue" between data science, ML engineering, and product teams.
• Communication: The ability to explain technical tradeoffs clearly and a focus on solutions that effectively reach customers.

Benefits

Our benefits include options for up to 100% paid Medical and Vision premiums for employees, a flexible PTO policy, paid holidays, and access to mental health and wellness resources. We also provide a 401(k) with pre‑tax, after‑tax, and Roth options, as well as short‑term/long‑term disability, life insurance, and other great benefits.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Demandbase

At Demandbase, we believe in creating a workplace culture that values and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We recognize that everyone brings unique experiences, perspectives, and identities to the table, and we are committed to building a community where everyone feels valued, respected, and supported. Discrimination of any kind is not tolerated, and we strive to ensure that every individual has an equal opportunity to succeed and grow, regardless of their gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, race, ethnicity, background, marital status, genetic information, education level, veteran status, national origin, or any other protected status. We do not automatically disqualify applicants with criminal records and will consider each applicant on a case‑by‑case basis.

We recognize that not all candidates will have every skill or qualification listed in this job description. If you feel you have the level of experience to be successful in the role, we encourage you to apply!

We acknowledge that true diversity and inclusion requires ongoing effort, and we are committed to doing the work required to make our workplace a safe and equitable space for all. Join us in building a community where we can learn from each other, celebrate our differences, and work together.