Senior Applied ML Scientist - Scalable NLP & LLMs

102 Yahoo Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 144,000 - 299,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible hybrid work options

Healthcare benefits

401k and education stipends

Job summary

Yahoo seeks an experienced Applied ML Researcher to advance transformer-based models for large-scale email analytics. You will blend theory with production-ready execution, focusing on NLP, knowledge distillation, and efficient inference across massive data.

You will collaborate across teams to translate research into practical AI solutions while mentoring others and advancing evaluation methodologies. This role supports hybrid work arrangements at Yahoo.

Qualifications

• PhD (preferred) or Master’s degree in Computer Science, ML, NLP, or related field.
• 4+ years of hands-on experience in applied ML and DL with NLP and generative models at scale.
• Demonstrated experience fine-tuning LLMs using LoRA or other parameter-efficient methods.
• Experience with knowledge distillation, model compression, and training smaller models from larger teachers.
• Deep understanding of transformer architectures (encoder/decoder) and modern generative techniques.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks for generative systems, including prompt-based evals.
• Proficient in Python and DL frameworks (PyTorch/TensorFlow) and Hugging Face tooling.
• Experience building scalable data pipelines and training workflows for large datasets.

Responsibilities

• Lead R&D: develop deep learning models for large-scale email and communication data.
• Model optimization: fine-tune open-source models with LoRA/adapters and quantization-aware training.
• Efficiency at scale: implement knowledge distillation to transfer capabilities to smaller models.
• Modern evaluation: build evaluation frameworks, including LLM-as-judge methods.
• Product integration: create scalable training workflows for production environments.
• Future-proofing: explore agent-based systems and long-term AI roadmaps.
• Mentorship: guide junior researchers and contribute to the team.

Skills

Transformers

NLP

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Hugging Face

LoRA

Model fine-tuning

Education

PhD (preferred) or Master’s degree in CS/ML/NLP

Tools

Hugging Face

PyTorch

TensorFlow

GCP

Job description

Yahoo seeks an experienced Applied ML Researcher to advance transformer-based models for large-scale email analytics. You will blend theory with production-ready execution, focusing on NLP, knowledge distillation, and efficient inference across massive data.

You will collaborate across teams to translate research into practical AI solutions while mentoring others and advancing evaluation methodologies. This role supports hybrid work arrangements at Yahoo.