Lead Data Scientist, AI Labs - Public Media Personalization

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

Job summary

National Public Radio (NPR) is hiring a Lead Data Scientist for the AI Labs team in Washington, DC. You will anchor technical and ethical aspects of NPR’s AI initiatives, focusing on fine-tuning existing models and deploying ML algorithms for public media.

You will collaborate across product, design and engineering to build scalable data pipelines, ensure secure cloud deployments, and uphold high standards for accuracy and neutrality in model outputs.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional experience in Data Science, ML, or NLP shipping production-grade systems.
• Proven track record with LLMs and foundational architectures.
• Experience with ASR, diarization, and audio preprocessing pipelines.
• Experience designing and maintaining large-scale data architectures, vector databases, and semantic search pipelines.
• Hands‑on experience building production‑grade recommendation/personalization systems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead the selection, fine-tuning, and optimization of LLMs for NPR’s content voice.
• Design automated ML pipelines to transform audio and text into semantic metadata.
• Collaborate with product/design/engineering to translate needs into workflows.
• Architect recommendation frameworks for audience personalization while preserving editorial curation.
• Partner with Data Products to build clean data pipelines and analytics models in BigQuery.
• Support newsroom research with API-driven tooling and secure search models.
• Establish evaluation and benchmarking to ensure factual accuracy and neutrality.

Skills

Data Science

LLMs

NLP

ASR

Cloud Infra

Cross-functional

Ethics & Privacy

Python

Education

PhD in CS/ML

Tools

BigQuery

SQL

VectorDB

CI/CD

Job description

National Public Radio (NPR) is hiring a Lead Data Scientist for the AI Labs team in Washington, DC. You will anchor technical and ethical aspects of NPR’s AI initiatives, focusing on fine-tuning existing models and deploying ML algorithms for public media.

You will collaborate across product, design and engineering to build scalable data pipelines, ensure secure cloud deployments, and uphold high standards for accuracy and neutrality in model outputs.