Associate Research Scientist

About Rakuten International  

Rakuten International is a division of Rakuten Group, Inc., a Japanese global technology leader in services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. Headquartered in San Mateo, California with more than 4,000 employees worldwide, the Rakuten International business portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce, digital marketing, advertising, communications and entertainment. We create products and services that provide exceptional value by aligning members and the businesses that want to engage them in a shared community. 

Job Summary:

We are seeking an innovative and dedicated research scientist to join RIT. As anAssociate Research Scientist, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of AI within Rakuten's diverse ecosystem. Our team focuses on enhancing in-house Large Language Models (LLMs) and seamlessly integrating them into Rakuten's services, impacting millions of users worldwide. We are a collaborative and innovative group, working on cutting-edge research and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing. The ideal candidate will have a passion for producing groundbreaking research and collaborating with teams across Rakuten to deliver impactful AI solutions.

We welcome exceptional researchers and engineers from other fields who may not have direct experience in generative AI to apply. This role provides an opportunity to gain the critical skills and knowledge needed to transition into the AI & ML space. We are committed to supporting career changers who bring unique perspectives and expertise, and we offer mentorship and resources to facilitate your growth in the AI and ML domains.  

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop and train LLMs, including data processing, pre-training, and fine-tuning. This also includes designing and running experiments, writing code, and evaluating results.

• Implement and verify latest technologies in Deep Learning, LLMs and AI agent fields, and reflect the implementation into in-house machine learning libraries.

• Work collaboratively with globally distributed people in a range of roles, including researchers, engineers, product managers, designers, and other key product stakeholders to accomplish complex tasks that deliver value to our business.

• Present findings and insights in team meetings and contributing to project documentation.

• Stay up to date on research and product advances in AI.

Qualifications:

• Proven experience in a research-focused role within industry, academia, or government institutions.

• Experience participatinginmachinelearningprojects, havingcompletedtheentirecycleofmodeltraining, experimentaldesign, andevaluation.

• Basic knowledgeandunderstandingofnaturallanguageprocessing, deeplearningandgenerative AI, includingLLMs, RAG, and AI agents, and a passionforstayingattheforefrontofthesetechnologies.

• High-levelcodingskillsin Python, with a strongunderstandingofsoftwareengineeringprinciples.

• Experience inpre-training/fine-tuningexistingLLMs (> 1B) usingPyTorch.

• Strongcommunicationskillstounderstandandeffectivelyconveytechnicalinformation.

• A strongemphasisonteamworkand a proactiveattitudetowardslearning.

• Ability to speak, write, and communicate in Japanese is a plus 

• Experience presenting as first author at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences.

• Familiarity with efficient training and inference techniques such as LoRA, pruning, knowledge distillation, and mixed precision training.

• Experience with distributed training frameworks such as DeepSpeed and FSDP.

• Experience with multilingual and multimodal modeling.

• Experience in developing software to process a large-scale dataset using a distributed computing framework (e.g., Hadoop)

Minimum Requirements:

• Masters in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related field with 2+ years of experience in relevant industry experience.

• PhD in in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related field preferred