Applied ML Researcher: Customer-Focused to Production

River AI Inc.; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 420,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental and vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Relocation assistance

Visa sponsorship

Job summary

River AI Inc. is seeking exceptional applied researchers to work directly with customers across industries to train and improve their own models.

You will own the applied research lifecycle from problem definition to data preparation, experiment design, training, and evaluation, collaborating with River's research and infrastructure teams to apply modern deep learning techniques to practical customer problems.

Qualifications

• BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, or equivalent practical industry experience.
• Strong understanding of modern deep learning architectures and practical experience training, fine-tuning, and evaluating language or multimodal models.
• Extensive hands-on experience with PyTorch or JAX, with a track record of writing clean, scalable code for model training and experimentation.
• Proven ability to turn open-ended problems and imperfect real-world data into working models, using rigorous experiments and evaluation to guide decisions.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work directly with customers, learn new domains, and explain technical tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
• A highly collaborative mindset, ownership of outcomes, and a bias for action in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Partner directly with customers across industries to understand workflows, identify high-value modeling problems, and define success criteria.
• Develop data preparation and curation pipelines with customer teams, turning domain-specific data and expert feedback into training datasets and representative evaluations.
• Design and run training experiments using techniques such as continued pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), selecting approaches that fit each customer's goals, data, and compute budget.
• Build evaluation suites, analyze model failures, and iterate on data and training methods to improve quality, reliability, and performance on real customer tasks.
• Work with customer engineers and River's infrastructure team to scale training runs, resolve bottlenecks, and support deployment and ongoing model improvement.
• Turn lessons from customer engagements into reusable training recipes, evaluation tools, and improvements to River's platform.

Skills

Deep learning architectures

PyTorch

JAX

Experimental design

Communication

Collaboration

Education

BS/MS/PhD in CS/ML/Math

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

River AI Inc. is seeking exceptional applied researchers to work directly with customers across industries to train and improve their own models.

You will own the applied research lifecycle from problem definition to data preparation, experiment design, training, and evaluation, collaborating with River's research and infrastructure teams to apply modern deep learning techniques to practical customer problems.