Lead Data Scientist, AI Labs — LLMs & Personalization

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

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive NPR benefits

Job summary

NPR is seeking a Lead Data Scientist for the AI Labs team to anchor NPR's AI initiatives, focusing on fine-tuning and deploying ML models for metadata-driven personalization. You will drive secure cloud deployments, guardrails for privacy, and ethics in model outputs, partnering across the organization.

The role emphasizes accuracy, non-bias, and scalable architectures, with a hybrid work arrangement and collaboration with newsroom research for API-driven tooling.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Data Science or ML.
• Experience shipping production-grade data science systems.
• Experience with LLMs and foundational architectures.

Responsibilities

• Lead selection, fine-tuning, and optimization of LLMs for NPR content voice.
• Design ML pipelines to transform audio, transcripts, and text into metadata.
• Collaborate with product/engineering to implement data science workflows.

Skills

Python

ML

Vector search

RAG

Retrieval pipelines

SQL

Cloud platforms

Model evaluation

Ethics & privacy

Education

PhD in CS/DS/ML

Tools

BigQuery

Snowflake

Job description

NPR is seeking a Lead Data Scientist for the AI Labs team to anchor NPR's AI initiatives, focusing on fine-tuning and deploying ML models for metadata-driven personalization. You will drive secure cloud deployments, guardrails for privacy, and ethics in model outputs, partnering across the organization.

The role emphasizes accuracy, non-bias, and scalable architectures, with a hybrid work arrangement and collaboration with newsroom research for API-driven tooling.