Staff AI Scientist

Uniphore; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual incentive

Stock options

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) with match

Paid time off

Birthday leave

Job summary

Uniphore is building a world-class Business AI platform to democratize AI for business users. You will work on foundational machine learning technology behind a category-defining product, training small and efficient foundation models and optimizing AI agents for real-world use cases.

You will collaborate with engineering teams on integration, monitoring, and lifecycle management, while mentoring junior scientists and shaping the technical direction with evidence-based recommendations.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Operations Research, Statistics, or related fields.
• 5+ years designing, building and iterating ML systems with frontier/open‑source models.
• Ability to translate business impact into quantitative metrics and design experiments.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement AI systems capable of handling complex workflows, including multi-step reasoning and decision making.
• Lead systematic experimentation across prompts, agents, model variants, and tool configurations.
• Fine-tune and optimize foundation models for latency, cost, and reliability.
• Own end-to-end AI workflows from problem framing through deployment with engineering partners.
• Mentor junior scientists on experimentation methodology and evaluation design.

Skills

ML systems design

GenAI frontier models

Experiment design & statistics

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication skills

Education

MS/PhD in CS/ML/OR/Statistics

Tools

Python

PyTorch

Open-source models

Job description

Uniphore is one of the largest B2B AI-native companies—decades‑proven, built‑for‑scale and designed for the enterprise. The company drives business outcomes across multiple industry verticals and enables the largest global deployments.
Uniphore infuses AI into every part of the enterprise that impacts the customer, delivering a multimodal architecture centered on customers that combines Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI, workflow automation and a co‑pilot to guide you. We understand better than anyone how to capture voice, video and text and analyze all types of data.

Job Description

About the role

Uniphore is building the world’s best‑in‑class Business AI platform to enable business users to leverage the advances of artificial intelligence to solve problems in their specific business processes. Uniphore provides a composable, sovereign, and secure solution to business users, and drives AI adoption in organizations with innovative solutions to building, serving, and optimizing these AI solutions.

Location: Palo Alto, CA

You will be working on developing new foundational machine learning technology behind a category‑defining product – Business AI will democratize the benefits of cutting‑edge machine intelligence at scale to more customers. If you are ready to take on the challenge of building the foundation model that enables a wide suite of capabilities around AI agent optimization, training of small and efficient foundation models, human‑AI interaction, and agentic evaluation, etc., come join us!

Responsibilities

AI System Design & Implementation

• Design and implement AI systems capable of handling complex workflows, including multi‑step reasoning, planning, and decision making.
• Explore and apply various orchestration patterns and architectures to solve business problems effectively.
• Translate abstract requirements into reliable AI behaviors under real operational constraints such as latency, cost, and safety.

Experimentation & Evaluation

• Leadsystematic experimentationacross prompts, agents, model variants, and tool configurations.
• Define and implementevaluation strategies for agentic systems, including task success, robustness, failure recovery, and hallucination analysis.
• Develop lightweight benchmarks, simulations, and offline/online evaluation loops to guide rapid iteration and decision making.

Model Optimization & SLMs

• Finetune and adaptsmall and medium-sized foundation modelsusing techniques such as PEFT, SFT, distillation, and reinforcement learning.
• Balance performance, latency, and cost for enterprisegrade workloads.
• Contribute to model selection decisions (SLMs vs. larger models) based on usecase requirements and empirical evidence.

Applied EndtoEnd Delivery

• Ownbounded, endtoend AI workflowsfrom problem framing through deployment where this accelerates impact.
• Partner with engineering teams on integration, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Contribute to production readiness without acting as a fulltime platform or infrastructure owner.

Technical Leadership

• Act as a technical reference point foragentic AI best practicesacross the team.
• Mentor junior scientists on experimentation methodology, evaluation design, and practical GenAI system development.
• Influence roadmap and technical direction throughevidencebacked recommendations.

We're Eager to Work with

• Those who want to join our mission to democratize AI to more business users.
• Individuals with an unwavering customer focus, committed to crafting experiences that delight.
• Those who embrace excellence and consistently deliver top‑tier work.
• Innovators who thrive on creative thinking and daring to tread new paths.
• Owners at heart, ready to take responsibility and drive results.
• Individuals of the highest integrity, who foster trust and honesty.

Minimum Qualifications

• Education: MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Operations Research, Statistics, or related fields.
• Applied ML / GenAI Experience: 5+ years designing, building and iterating on ML systems, with hands‑on experience using frontier models and open‑source models.
• Experience in translating business impact into quantitative metrics and designing experiments and statistical analysis of results.
• Experience in working with cross‑functional teams to deliver ML capabilities in customer‑facing products and maintaining ML quality.
• Strong communication skills, verbal and written.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong experience in model training, building autonomous agentic systems and agentic workflows, and rigorous evaluation of agentic systems.
• Demonstrated track record of excellence (e.g., publications at top‑tier peer‑reviewed conferences or journals) or significant product impact with highly technical solutions, and desire to grow.
• Experience at fast‑growing companies or startups, or working in an agile environment.

Benefits

In addition to competitive base pay, this position also includes an annual incentive opportunity based on target achievement, pre‑IPO stock options, benefits including medical, dental, vision, 401(k) with a match, and more, plus generous paid time off, paid holidays, paid day off for your birthday and other paid leave policies to support employees through all phases of life.

Location preference

USA - CA - Palo Alto

Uniphore is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity in the workplace. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics.

For more information on how Uniphore uses AI to unify—and humanize—every enterprise experience, please visit www.uniphore.com.