Senior Applied ML Scientist for Large-Scale NLP

Yahoo; United States; Hybrid; USD 128,000 - 299,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

401k

Education stipends

Backup childcare

Job summary

Yahoo Mail is seeking an Applied ML Researcher to bridge theory and production. You will advance transformer-based models, NLP workflows, and scalable evaluation for billions of emails, with a focus on low-latency inference and production tooling.

The role emphasizes practical impact, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship within a fast-moving team. You will lead research on deep learning models, distillation, and tool use, while contributing to the development of scalable data pipelines

Qualifications

• PhD (preferred) or MS in CS, ML, NLP or related field.
• 6+ years of hands-on ML/DL experience at scale.
• Experience fine-tuning LLMs with LoRA or similar methods.
• Experience with knowledge distillation and model compression.

Responsibilities

• Lead R&D for deep learning and generative AI models tailored for large-scale email data.
• Define and advance fine-tuning/adaptation of open-source foundation models.
• Design and implement knowledge distillation to run smaller high-performance models with low latency.
• Establish robust evaluation frameworks and production-ready workflows.

Skills

Transformer architectures

NLP at scale

Python

PyTorch

Hugging Face tooling

Model compression

Education

PhD or MS in CS/ML/NLP

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Hugging Face tooling

GitHub Copilot

Cursor

Job description

Yahoo Mail is seeking an Applied ML Researcher to bridge theory and production. You will advance transformer-based models, NLP workflows, and scalable evaluation for billions of emails, with a focus on low-latency inference and production tooling.

The role emphasizes practical impact, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship within a fast-moving team. You will lead research on deep learning models, distillation, and tool use, while contributing to the development of scalable data pipelines