Company Description

At Databricks, we are obsessed with enabling data teams to solve the world’s toughest problems, from security threat detection to cancer drug development. We do this by building and running the world’s best data and AI platform, so our customers can focus on the high value challenges that are central to their own missions.

The Mosaic AI organization enables companies to develop AI models and systems using their own data, with technologies ranging from pre-training LLMs from scratch to augmented generation using the latest retrieval techniques. Mosaic AI does so by producing novel science and putting it into production. Mosaic AI is committed to the belief that a company’s AI models are just as valuable as any other core IP, and that high-quality AI models should be available to all.

Job Description

As a Research Scientist on the Mosaic AI Team at Databricks, you will be responsible for keeping up with the latest developments in deep learning and advancing the scientific frontier by creating new techniques that go beyond the state of the art. You will work together on a collaborative team of researchers with diverse backgrounds and technical training. And most importantly, you will love our customers: our goal is to make our customers successful in applying state-of-the-art LLMs and AI systems, and we encode our scientific expertise into our products to make that possible.

Specific to this role, you will build on and enhance our existing text+image capabilities by implementing and training new models, bringing in new techniques for higher quality and more efficient training,  incorporating additional datasets, and adding new evaluation methods. You will study the latest techniques in these areas, improve upon them to meet our needs, and generalize them to meet the needs of our customers.

You might be a good fit if you…

• Are comfortable working with large-scale computer vision models.
• Have solid ML and/or software engineering and scientific research skills.
• Have produced novel research related to training neural networks for computer vision, image/video generation, vision+text understanding, or similar.
• Have specialized expertise in core computer vision tasks, image/video generation, image captioning, multimodal LLMs, etc.
• Are passionate about getting your work into the hands of real users and - more broadly - democratizing access to modern AI technology.
• Have strong communication skills and a desire to work on a small, fast-paced team.

A PhD is NOT required for this role. We are open to hiring candidates with bachelor’s and master’s degrees and to new graduates. We are open to hiring candidates who are currently in "research engineer" roles at other companies. 

Your Responsibilities

• Keeping up to date with the research literature and thinking beyond the state of the art to address the needs of our users.
• Developing and implementing methods that extend and improve model capabilities, reliability, and safety.
• Rigorously evaluating these methods, communicating the results of your findings, and putting those that are useful into production.