Lead Data Scientist, AI Labs — LLMs & Personalization

Nationalpublicradioinc; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 164,000 - 201,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

NPR Benefits

Hybrid work model

Competitive salary

Job summary

NPR is seeking a Lead Data Scientist for the AI Labs team to anchor NPR's AI initiatives. You will fine-tune, evaluate, and scale models, deploy ML algorithms, and collaborate across the organization to secure cloud deployments and protect IP.

The role emphasizes accuracy, journalistic ethics, data privacy, and responsible scaling, with hybrid work and in-office presence in Washington, D.C. or New York City.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in Data Science, ML or NLP shipping production-grade systems.
• Experience fine-tuning, evaluating LLMs and foundational architectures.
• ASR and audio preprocessing pipelines experience.
• Designing large-scale data architectures, vector databases and semantic search pipelines.
• Hands-on experience building production-grade recommender/personalization systems.
• Cloud experience with Azure, AWS or GCP.
• Cross-disciplinary collaboration with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Identify AI pitfalls and design robust workarounds.

Responsibilities

• Lead selection, fine-tuning and optimization of LLMs for NPR’s content voice.
• Design ML pipelines to transform audio/text into rich metadata.
• Collaborate with product, design and engineering to productionize data science workflows.
• Architect recommendation frameworks for style-based audience personalization.
• Partner with Data Products to build clean data pipelines in BigQuery.
• Support newsroom research with API-driven tooling and secure search models.
• Establish evaluation and benchmarking to ensure factual accuracy and neutrality.
• Identify and mitigate algorithmic bias in metadata generation.

Skills

Python

ML engineering

Prompt engineering

API integration

Data privacy

AI ethics

RAG patterns

Cloud platforms

SQL

Education

PhD preferred

Advanced CS/DS/ML degree

Tools

BigQuery

Snowflake

Vector databases

Semantic search tools

API tooling

Job description

NPR is seeking a Lead Data Scientist for the AI Labs team to anchor NPR's AI initiatives. You will fine-tune, evaluate, and scale models, deploy ML algorithms, and collaborate across the organization to secure cloud deployments and protect IP.

The role emphasizes accuracy, journalistic ethics, data privacy, and responsible scaling, with hybrid work and in-office presence in Washington, D.C. or New York City.