Principal Applied Scientist, Small Language Models

Job Description

Job DescriptionPrincipal Applied Scientist, Small Language Models. Full-time New York City, NY, US Exclusive confidential search — details shared with qualified applicants. Benefits You'll Love

• Top-tier medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k)

Become a Key Player as a Principal Applied Scientist, Small Language Models

You will own the small, purpose-built language model that enforces compliance in real time, ensuring messages are safe before they are sent. In this hands-on senior individual contributor role you will drive model design, evaluation, and production performance, working directly with the founder and cross-functional stakeholders. Hybrid (3 days onsite in New York City).

Here's How You'll Make an Impact on the Team

• Own the compliance detection and rewrite model end-to-end: data, architecture, training, evaluation, and production
• Build the evaluation harness and labeled-data flywheel to prove model quality
• Optimize and balance accuracy, cost, and latency for production use
• Define and execute the path from frontier models to a smaller specialized model that matches or beats accuracy at lower cost and latency
• Build infrastructure for per-customer adaptation, including adapters and per-tenant tuning
• Translate plain-language policy into enforceable model behavior and document reasoning for model decisions
• Run focused error analysis on critical cases (missed violations and false positives)

Here's What You'll Need to Be Successful in This Role

• 8+ years in applied ML or AI with models shipped and maintained in production
• Hands-on expertise in modern NLP and LLM techniques, including fine-tuning, distillation, and rigorous evaluation
• Strong judgment as a senior individual contributor who sets technical direction
• Deep instincts for model design tradeoffs (when to fine-tune vs. prompt, when to distill, when smaller models suffice)
• Bias for shipping and measuring everything you deploy

Here's What Else Might Help You Out

• Experience transitioning systems from large general models to smaller specialized models for cost and latency
• Background in compliance, regtech, or other regulated domains
• Experience adapting one model to many customers (adapters, per-tenant tuning)
• Public research, open source contributions, or technical writing

Pay Range

$200,000 - $250,000/year

Ready to Make Your Mark?

This role may fill quickly. Submit your resume to be considered.

Apply with Pioneers here