Principal Research Scientist
No salary listed
Senior, Expert
PhD
Montreal, QC, Canada
HybridTwo days per week in the office required.
AI & Machine LearningAI Research
About the job
Requirements
- A PhD in computer science, machine learning, or a related field, or equivalent research experience.
- Eight or more years of research experience after the PhD, with a significant portion in an industrial setting or in direct contact with deployed systems.
- An established publication record at top-tier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, or equivalent venues, with contributions recognized as influential in the field.
- A demonstrated track record of setting a research agenda rather than only executing one, including choosing important problems before the wider community focused on them.
- Experience providing scientific leadership to cross-disciplinary teams or projects that bring together researchers and engineers.
- Strong software development skills, including writing, maintaining, and optimizing high-quality research code for production use.
- Advanced use of agentic tools in research practice and willingness to advance the team's practices in this area.
- A demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions beyond the candidate's own team, particularly with product and engineering teams.
- Excellent communication skills, including explaining complex technical work to non-specialist audiences and executives.
Responsibilities
- Lead research initiatives on how agents accumulate and reuse tacit knowledge, learn and improve continuously, and operate with resilience, safety, and data privacy.
- Explore safety mechanisms, threat detection, privacy guarantees, and responsible artificial intelligence practices that support enterprise adoption of agentic systems.
- Publish research and advance the state of the art.
- Test research hypotheses against real enterprise deployments and operational environments.
Desired Qualifications
- Expertise in one or more of the following areas: agent memory and tacit knowledge, continual learning, safety and alignment, security and threat detection, privacy, or agent evaluation.
- Experience with artificial intelligence systems operating in real enterprise environments under compliance, governance, and scale constraints.
- Contributions to open-source software, datasets, or evaluation benchmarks used by the community.
- Scientific service roles such as program committees, editorial work, or workshop organization.
- Academic collaborations or supervision of doctoral students.
- Fluency in French or interest in learning French in a bilingual Montreal work environment.
About the company
ServiceNow builds cloud software that helps large organizations manage work across IT, customer service, human resources, and security. Its applications handle tasks such as resolving support tickets, onboarding employees, and responding to customer requests. Businesses configure forms, approval steps, and automation through visual tools on a common platform, connecting existing systems and using AI to assist workers or carry out tasks. The company sells subscriptions to its applications and platform, with professional services helping customers implement and use the software. Founded in 2004, ServiceNow is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
Company Size
10,001+
Company Stage
IPO
Headquarters
Santa Clara, California
Founded
2004
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Subscriptions grew: ServiceNow reported $3.877 billion in subscription revenue for the June 2026 quarter, up 24.5% year over year.
- Hybrid work is established: ServiceNow says most staff have flexible arrangements, requiring two or more office days weekly.
- Security work expanded: the April 2026 Armis acquisition added protection for industrial equipment, medical devices, and connected hardware.
What critics are saying
- Subscription margins narrowed: in June 2026, ServiceNow kept 73.5% of subscription revenue after direct costs, versus 80% a year earlier.
- Remote roles limit relocation: ServiceNow requires staff to remain within their employment state, province, region, or country.
- Older versions lose support: ServiceNow supports two release families and schedules upgrades for customers who fall behind.
What makes ServiceNow unique
- Customers get separated systems: ServiceNow assigns each customer its own software instance and database, unlike shared tenant designs.
- Outages get business context: ServiceNow's configuration database maps servers and applications to the business services depending on them.
- Customers choose upgrade timing: ServiceNow's separate instances let enterprises schedule releases independently from other customers.
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Benefits
- Generous family leave
- Flexible PTO
- Matched Donations
- Retirement benefits
- Annual learning stipends
- Paid volunteer time