Senior Research Scientist, LLM

Join Axon and be a Force for Good.

At Axon, we’re on a mission to Protect Life. We’re explorers, pursuing society’s most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other.

Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you’ll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that matters at a company where you matter.

Your Impact

Do you want to contribute to the work that addresses some of today’s most challenging problems in the public safety space? Are you passionate about AI and Machine Learning? Are you looking for an opportunity to train machine learning models and deploy it in real life situations for the greater good?

As a Sr. Research Scientist II, you will investigate the research approach, assess the implementation risk and define the success metrics for multiple AI/ML projects while collaborating with other research scientists and machine learning engineers. You will be actively involving the entire AI innovation life cycle from model prototyping to deployment and continuous learning.

The ideal candidate will have a proven scientific background and a consistent track record of successfully researching and delivering scalable AI-based products with hands-on execution. We need someone willing to be fearless and more than willing to take on bold challenges. By accelerating adoption of our technologies, you'll help protect life in public safety for both officers and the communities they serve around the world.

What You’ll Do

• Drive one or more phases in ML development: shape datasets, investigate ML architectures, train/evaluate/tune ML models, implement end-end pipeline.
• Leverage state-of-the-art research to deliver high quality models enabling multiple AI projects at scale.
• Contribute back to the research community via academic publications, tech blogs, open-source code and contributing to internal/external AI challenges.

What you Bring

• A Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Applied Mathematics or an equivalent highly technical field
• 5+ years of combined academic and industrial research experience developing LLM and other NLU models.
• Drive one or more phases of the ML development lifecycle: shape datasets, investigate modeling approaches and architectures, train/evaluate/tune models and implement the end-to-end training pipeline.
• Experience in big data ML as well as data efficient ML that leverages techniques such as synthetic data construction, transfer learning, active learning, semi-supervised learning, few-shot learning.
• Hands on experience in developing, scaling and implementing machine learning solutions using relevant programming languages (such as Python), state-of-the-art deep learning frameworks (such as PyTorch and Tensorflow) and code development and review tools (such as Github).
• Experience in prompt engineering.
• Experience in finetuning ML models.
• Experience in developing LLM-based applications including agent-based systems, RAG-based systems.
• Be Familiar with NLU/LLM cloud services and APIs (such as from OpenAI).
• Deep understanding of metrics for offline and online evaluation of LLM-based systems.
• Track record of publications and contributions to the machine learning community.
• Experience with designing and shipping software products that leverage machine learning at scale.
• Excellent problem solving skills and ability to dive into learning optimization, model architecture, evaluation metrics, and field testing scenarios.
• Comfort communicating and interacting with scientists, engineers and product managers as well as understanding and translating the science of AI and Machine Learning to a more general audience.

Preferred

• A Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Applied Mathematics or an equivalent highly technical field.
• Be familiar with privacy-preserving ML and ethical AI techniques.
• Demonstrated knowledge and experience with distributed machine learning and deploying models at scale in cloud environments (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud).
• Familiarity with IoT/Edge AI and optimizing ML models to run on-device with constrained compute, power and latency budgets.
• Familiarity with multi-modal AI development.

Benefits that Benefit You

• An awesome office/working environment with the latest technologies
• Competitive salary and benefits including a great medical insurance plan for you and your family
• Free lunch, gym, phone stipend, parking
• Fun team activities and outings
• Flexible working hours
• Opportunities for training and rotations in the US
• Opportunities to ride along with real US police officers in real life situations, see them use technology, and get inspired

The Pay: Axon is a total compensation company, meaning compensation is made up of base pay, bonus, and stock awards. The starting base pay for this role is between USD 230,000 in the lowest geographic market and USD 320,000 in the highest geographic market.The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: level, function, training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, geographic market, and often a combination of all these factors. Our benefits offer an array of options to help support you physically, financially and emotionally through the big milestones and in your everyday life. To see more details on our benefits offerings please visit www.axon.com/careers/benefits.

Don’t meet every single requirement? That's ok. At Axon, we Aim Far. We think big with a long-term view because we want to reinvent the world to be a safer, better place. We are also committed to building diverse teams that reflect the communities we serve.

Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they check every box in the job description. If you’re excited about this role and our mission to Protect Life but your experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification listed here, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Important Notes

The above job description is not intended as, nor should it be construed as, exhaustive of all duties, responsibilities, skills, efforts, or working conditions associated with this job. The job description may change or be supplemented at any time in accordance with business needs and conditions.

Some roles may also require legal eligibility to work in a firearms environment.

Axon’s mission is to Protect Life and is committed to the well-being and safety of its employees as well as Axon’s impact on the environment. All Axon employees must be aware of and committed to the appropriate environmental, health, and safety regulations, policies, and procedures. Axon employees are empowered to report safety concerns as they arise and activities potentially impacting the environment.

We are an equal opportunity employer that promotes justice, advances equity, values diversity and fosters inclusion. We’re committed to hiring the best talent — regardless of race, creed, color, ancestry, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances — and empowering all of our employees so they can do their best work. If you have a disability or special need that requires assistance or accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email recruitingops@axon.com. Please note that this email address is for accommodation purposes only. Axon will not respond to inquiries for other purposes.