Today’s Data Scientists are in pain - spending their time manually wrangling data, building models through slow trial and error, taking on painstaking rewrites for deployment, and dealing with countless other frustrating bottlenecks. And the tools they are using for much of this work – e.g. Jupyter notebooks and Pandas – are over a decade old.
We founded Delphina to change this: our mission is to help the world get better at using data to understand the present and predict the future. Delphina leverages a combination of generative AI, large scale optimization, and specialized infrastructure to automate the time-consuming but necessary tasks to build powerful ML models quickly; Delphina will identify relevant data, clean it, train models, and even productionize pipelines.
Our team has previously led large data science and machine learning teams (covering both applications and infrastructure), built startups, and created successful tools for enterprise ML.
This role is based in San Mateo, CA. We are in person 2 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In select cases we also offer remote options.

We’re looking for a Research Scientist to join as a founding team member of Delphina.
As one of our key early hires, you will partner closely with our early team on the direction of our product and drive critical technical decisions. You will have broad impact over the technology, product, and our company’s culture.
As a Research Scientist at Delphina, you will conduct research investigating how ML workflows can be automated using generative AI. You will be responsible for:
- Making sense of existing research and transforming the latest academic research into production-ready solutions. The research literature is massive and changing fast. You will use your skills as a scientist to source, vet, implement, and improve promising ideas from the literature and of your own creation.
- Doing science driven by customer needs. Priorities in academia aren’t the same as driving real world impact. We will look to you to drive science guided by real customer need.
- Turning science into product. We expect our Research Scientists to collaborate closely with the rest of our cross functional team to shape our direction and drive outcomes.
- Working independently. We believe that scientists benefit from high levels of autonomy and we are indexed on giving you the space you need to succeed.

We are looking for practical or research experience in the following areas:
- Feature search
- Feature generation
- Sparse autoencoders
- Data search
- Deep learning
- LLM Agents
- AutoML
Sufficient software engineering skills to conduct large-scale research experiments and build production prototypes
Demonstrated track record of success in research – whether papers, tools, or other research artifacts
Energy and ambition to build a product that is surprisingly good in surprising ways.
Intrinsic desire to always be improving our product and yourself. Growth mindset to both stay ahead of the curve and pick up whatever knowledge you’re missing to get the job done.

Experience building + shipping ML production systems
Experience with data management and distributed data processing solutions (e.g. Spark, Snowflake, etc.)