Principal Scientist: Open-Source Synthetic Data for LLMs

NVIDIA; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 272,000 - 431,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

NVIDIA in California seeks a Principal Scientist to set the technical direction for synthetic data generation across NVIDIA's frontier model efforts. You will define and build open-source libraries within the NVIDIA NeMo ecosystem that generate synthetic datasets across text, code, structured, and multimodal data, feeding pre- and post-training of LLMs such as Nemotron.

The role blends hands-on software engineering with applied research in generative methods, requiring leadership of researchers

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years of engineering and research experience in synthetic data generation, generative modeling, multimodal machine learning, or related areas.
• Deep technical understanding of LLMs, how data shapes their pre-training, post-training, and RL stages, and inference frameworks such as vLLM or TGI.
• Proven track record of developing or maintaining software libraries used by a broad developer community.
• Experience building and optimizing scalable data pipelines for large-scale model training — throughput, distributed inference, and cost at cluster scale.
• Strong publication record at premier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL or similar.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale data generation pipelines using LLM-based methods with automated quality evaluation.
• Pioneer data generation for agentic and tool-use training: synthetic trajectories, multi-turn interactions, function calling, and executable environments for reinforcement learning.
• Advance multimodal synthetic data generation — image, document, video, and audio.
• Advance privacy-preserving and safe synthesis — differential privacy, anonymization, and de-identification.
• Develop and maintain open-source libraries and SDKs with clean APIs and strong documentation.
• Publish original research at top machine learning and AI conferences.
• Mentor scientists and engineers across the team.

Job description

NVIDIA in California seeks a Principal Scientist to set the technical direction for synthetic data generation across NVIDIA's frontier model efforts. You will define and build open-source libraries within the NVIDIA NeMo ecosystem that generate synthetic datasets across text, code, structured, and multimodal data, feeding pre- and post-training of LLMs such as Nemotron.

The role blends hands-on software engineering with applied research in generative methods, requiring leadership of researchers