Senior AI Researcher

About the role

Phrase is looking for a Senior AI Researcher to lead a research workstream within its AI Research team. You will design, fine‑tune and evaluate large language models that power the company’s translation and language‑quality platform, turning research into production‑ready capabilities.

Key responsibilities

• Design, train and evaluate LLMs for translation and language‑quality tasks using techniques such as LoRA, DPO and instruction‑tuning.
• Build evaluation frameworks that combine automatic metrics (BLEU, TER, ChrF, MQM, COMET) with LLM‑as‑judge approaches.
• Develop agentic workflows for multi‑step reasoning, tool use and structured output generation.
• Own the end‑to‑end model‑development pipeline from data collection to production integration.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering and Solutions to ship research findings as shippable features.

Required profile

• PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics or related field, or equivalent MSc with strong research experience.
• Hands‑on experience fine‑tuning large transformer models and familiarity with pre‑training or preference‑tuning (RLHF/DPO).
• Proven expertise in at least one NLP area such as machine translation, MT evaluation, text generation or reinforcement learning.
• Experience delivering production NLP systems and managing data pipelines.

Required skills

• Python programming
• Hugging Face and PyTorch libraries
• Weights & Biases for experiment tracking
• Workflow orchestration tools (Flyte, Prefect, Airflow)
• Cloud ML services (AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI)
• Model serving frameworks (vLLM, TGI)
• Agentic pipeline frameworks (PydanticAI, LangGraph)
• Fine‑tuning techniques (LoRA, DPO)
• Automatic evaluation metrics (BLEU, TER, ChrF, MQM, COMET)

What we offer

• Work in a fast‑growing global SaaS company with an international team.
• Opportunities to influence product direction and mentor junior researchers.
• Professional development support and extensive onboarding.
• Additional holidays, birthday off, give‑back days and other local benefits.