Senior Applied Machine Learning Scientist
The Washington Post4 days ago
Washington, DC, USASenior
Base Salary
$132k - $219k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead applied research and development for AI/ML systems spanning generative AI, search, retrieval, ranking, content understanding, and recommendation.
- Formulate ambiguous product and business challenges as scientific problems with measurable metrics, experiments, and success criteria.
- Design, train, evaluate, and deploy LLM, VLM, embedding, learning-to-rank, and agentic workflow systems.
- Build and improve AI-powered products including Ask The Post, semantic search, question answering, ranking, content understanding, and intelligent discovery.
- Design offline and online evaluations involving relevance, ranking, retrieval quality, A/B testing, and causal analysis.
- Develop scalable production ML systems optimized for latency, reliability, cost, monitoring, and maintainability.
- Analyze large-scale behavioral, content, search, and interaction data to guide model and product improvements.
- Collaborate with scientists, engineers, data teams, product managers, editors, and business stakeholders.
- Provide technical leadership by shaping roadmaps, mentoring junior scientists and engineers, and promoting scientific rigor.
- Communicate technical approaches, tradeoffs, results, and business impact to technical and non-technical audiences.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
- At least 4 years of experience in applied machine learning, AI, data science, information retrieval, NLP, recommender systems, or a related field.
- Strong Python experience and proficiency with at least one ML framework such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX.
- Experience designing, evaluating, and deploying ML models using large-scale datasets.
- Strong foundation in machine learning, statistical analysis, experimental design, and model evaluation.
- Experience with search, ranking, retrieval, NLP, generative AI, or recommendation systems.
- Preferred: Master’s or Ph.D. in a related technical field.
- Preferred: familiarity with transformer-based models, embedding models, two-tower architectures, LLMs, and VLMs.
- Preferred: hands-on experience building production systems for semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, question answering, ranking, content understanding, recommendation, or generative-AI products.
- Preferred: experience with AWS, GCP, Spark, Beam, BigQuery, or similar cloud and big-data technologies.
- Preferred: experience with LLM/VLM evaluation, model calibration, uncertainty estimation, interpretability, responsible AI, or production model optimization.
- Preferred: experience with deep learning, reinforcement learning, multi-armed bandits, causal inference, or learning-to-rank methods.
- Preferred: publications, patents, open-source contributions, or technical talks in AI/ML, NLP, information retrieval, recommender systems, or generative AI.
- Preferred: experience mentoring scientists or engineers and influencing technical roadmaps.
Benefits
- On-site five days per week, except for certain newsgathering and business travel exceptions.
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- Company-paid pension and 401(k) match.
- Three weeks of vacation and up to three weeks of paid sick leave.
- Nine paid holidays and two personal days.
- Twenty weeks of paid parental leave for any new parent.
- Mental health resources, backup care, and caregiver concierge services.
- Gender-affirming services and pet insurance.
- Free Post digital subscription.
- Leadership and career development programs.
Tech Stack
Categories