Director of Applied Science - Responsible AI/Multimodal

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is seeking a Director of Applied Science to lead the Responsible AI Applied Science team. This leader will define and execute the scientific and technical strategy for building the next generation of Responsible AI technologies that enable customers to safely and reliably deploy multimodal generative AI models and agentic systems at enterprise scale.

The Responsible AI Applied Science team advances research and develops cutting-edge technologies for guardrailing multimodal generative AI models and AI agents. The team's work spans models and applications that reason over and generate across modalities—including text, images, audio, video, and combinations of these modalities. Research areas include content safety and moderation, prompt injection and adversarial attacks, privacy and PII protection, hallucination and grounding, reliability, formal verification, and emerging approaches for governing and constraining agent behavior.
As generative AI becomes increasingly multimodal, safety challenges extend beyond individual prompts and responses to the interactions between modalities, models, tools, and agents. The team develops new techniques for understanding and mitigating these risks while building guardrails that can operate effectively across diverse models, modalities, and enterprise use cases.
 

This is a senior scientific leadership role at the intersection of research, product, and engineering. The Director will lead a team of applied scientists, establish the team's research and product roadmap, and translate advances in multimodal Responsible AI into differentiated capabilities for OCI customers. The successful candidate will balance breakthrough research with pragmatic execution, ensuring the team's work results in production technologies, high-impact publications, patents, and meaningful advances in the state of the art.

Disclaimer:

Certain U.S. based or U.S. customer or client-facing roles may be required to comply with applicable requirements, such as immunization/occupational health mandates, and/or drug testing requirements.

Range and benefit information provided in this posting are specific to the stated locations only

US: Hiring Range in USD from: $169,800 to $355,400 per annum. May be eligible for bonus, equity, and compensation deferral.


Oracle maintains broad salary ranges for its roles in order to account for variations in knowledge, skills, experience, market conditions and locations, as well as reflect Oracle's differing products, industries and lines of business.
Candidates are typically placed into the range based on the preceding factors as well as internal peer equity.

Oracle US offers a comprehensive benefits package which includes the following:
1. Medical, dental, and vision insurance, including expert medical opinion
2. Short term disability and long term disability
3. Life insurance and AD&D
4. Supplemental life insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
5. Health care and dependent care Flexible Spending Accounts
6. Pre-tax commuter and parking benefits
7. 401(k) Savings and Investment Plan with company match
8. Paid time off: Flexible Vacation is provided to all eligible employees assigned to a salaried (non-overtime eligible) position. Accrued Vacation is provided to all other employees eligible for vacation benefits. For employees working at least 35 hours per week, the vacation accrual rate is 13 days annually for the first three years of employment and 18 days annually for subsequent years of employment. Vacation accrual is prorated for employees working between 20 and 34 hours per week. Employees working fewer than 20 hours per week are not eligible for vacation.
9. 11 paid holidays
10. Paid sick leave: 72 hours of paid sick leave upon date of hire. Refreshes each calendar year. Unused balance will carry over each year up to a maximum cap of 112 hours.
11. Paid parental leave
12. Adoption assistance
13. Employee Stock Purchase Plan
14. Financial planning and group legal
15. Voluntary benefits including auto, homeowner and pet insurance

The role will generally accept applications for at least three calendar days from the posting date or as long as the job remains posted.

Career Level - M4

What You'll Do

Set the Responsible AI Science Strategy

• Define the Applied Science roadmap for multimodal Responsible AI in OCI, identifying the highest-impact scientific and customer problems for the team to pursue.
• Establish priorities across near-term production deliverables and longer-term breakthrough research.
• Develop a research agenda for guardrailing generative AI across text, vision, audio, video, multimodal models, and agentic systems.
• Anticipate emerging risks and technical challenges as generative AI evolves from single-modality models toward increasingly multimodal, autonomous, tool-using, and agentic systems.
• Partner closely with Applied Science Architects, the Chief Scientist, engineering leaders, and product leadership to identify and invest in breakthrough science opportunities that can create differentiated capabilities for OCI.

Lead a High-Performing Applied Science Team

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of applied scientists working across Responsible AI, multimodal AI safety, and AI reliability.
• Establish a culture of scientific rigor, technical ambition, experimentation, collaboration, and customer impact.
• Provide technical and scientific direction while enabling senior scientists to independently lead significant research areas.
• Attract and develop exceptional scientific talent and build the capabilities required as the Responsible AI and multimodal AI landscapes evolve.

Advance the State of the Art in Multimodal Responsible AI

Drive research and innovation across areas including:

• Multimodal content safety, moderation, and policy enforcement across text, image, audio, and video
• Multimodal prompt injection, jailbreaks, and adversarial robustness
• Privacy, PII, and sensitive-information detection and protection across modalities
• Hallucination, grounding, and factuality detection and mitigation
• Safety and reliability of multimodal foundation models
• Cross-modal safety, including risks that emerge from interactions between different input and output modalities
• Formal methods and verification for AI systems
• Evaluation, benchmarking, and measurement of Responsible AI systems across models and modalities
• Guardrails for AI agents, including tool use, planning, actions, multimodal inputs and outputs, and multi-agent behavior
• Novel approaches to runtime monitoring, intervention, and enforcement for multimodal generative AI systems

Identify opportunities where advances in these areas can become production capabilities, publications, patents, or strategic intellectual property for Oracle.

Translate Research into Customer Value

• Work closely with engineering, product management, and other OCI stakeholders to productionize Responsible AI research into scalable multimodal guardrails and services.
• Develop a deep understanding of enterprise customer requirements and translate them into meaningful scientific and technical problems.
• Build guardrail technologies that can operate across different generative AI models and modalities while supporting diverse enterprise applications.
• Ensure Responsible AI technologies meet the performance, scalability, latency, reliability, and security requirements of OCI production environments.
• Define metrics and evaluation frameworks that measure safety and reliability across modalities and demonstrate both scientific progress and measurable customer value.
• Help establish OCI as a trusted platform for enterprises deploying multimodal generative AI and agentic applications.

Provide Scientific and Organizational Leadership

• Serve as a senior technical authority for multimodal Responsible AI across OCI.
• Communicate complex scientific topics, tradeoffs, risks, and opportunities to technical and executive audiences.
• Build strong partnerships across Applied Science, Engineering, Product, Security, and other organizations within Oracle.
• Represent Oracle's Responsible AI research through publications, patents, external scientific engagement, and collaboration with the broader research community where appropriate.

Qualifications

Required

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field, or equivalent demonstrated research and industry experience.
• Significant experience leading applied science or machine learning research teams working on complex, ambiguous technical problems.
• Deep expertise in machine learning, generative AI, natural language processing, computer vision, multimodal learning, or related areas, with strong familiarity with modern foundation models.
• Demonstrated ability to translate research innovations into production systems or customer-facing technologies.
• Strong scientific track record demonstrated through publications, patents, deployed technologies, or other significant technical contributions.
• Experience defining research roadmaps and making investment and prioritization decisions across multiple scientific areas.
• Ability to operate effectively across research, engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence technical strategy across organizational boundaries.

Preferred

• Expertise in one or more Responsible AI areas such as multimodal AI safety, model guardrails, adversarial robustness, content moderation, privacy, hallucination and grounding, model evaluation, formal verification, or AI agent safety.
• Experience working with multimodal foundation models, including vision-language models and models spanning text, image, audio, or video.
• Experience developing safety, security, or reliability technologies for large-scale AI systems.
• Experience with multimodal model evaluation, red teaming, adversarial testing, or runtime AI safety mechanisms.
• Familiarity with emerging challenges associated with AI agents, including tool-use safety, action validation, behavioral constraints, multimodal interactions, and agent monitoring.
• Experience building or operating AI/ML technologies in large-scale cloud environments.
• A track record of identifying emerging research areas and translating them into differentiated products or intellectual property.

What Success Looks Like

The Director of Applied Science will build a Responsible AI organization recognized for both scientific excellence and production impact, with a particular focus on making the rapidly evolving world of multimodal generative AI safer, more reliable, and enterprise-ready.

Success will mean establishing an ambitious research agenda for guardrailing models across modalities, developing exceptional scientists, delivering multimodal guardrails that provide tangible value to OCI customers, and creating breakthrough technologies that strengthen Oracle's position in safe and reliable enterprise AI.

The team's impact should be visible across three dimensions: production, through Responsible AI capabilities deployed for customers across models and modalities; scientific leadership, through influential research and publications; and innovation, through patents and differentiated technology that expands what is possible in trustworthy multimodal generative AI and agentic systems.

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