Applied AI Research Scientist

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Identify and scope opportunities, design rigorous experiments and execute the roadmap for foundation model research and development
• ▹Own the evaluation bar for foundation model performance: offline benchmarks, time- and entity-aware holdouts, calibration, drift and degradation monitoring and honest comparisons against strong classical baselines
• ▹Take models the full distance from data prep and tokenization through pretraining, fine-tuning, distillation and quantization to deployment behind a real-time inference path with tight latency budgets
• ▹Partner with Engineering on training infrastructure, GPU efficiency, feature and embedding stores and serving at production scale
• ▹Work directly with client-facing teams and customers to turn model capabilities and limits into decisions their risk teams can act on
• ▹Partner with Legal, Compliance and customer model risk teams to build the explainability, documentation and governance customers need

Requirements

• ▹4+ years in applied machine learning, quantitative modeling or ML engineering, including at least one foundation model you pre-trained or substantially adapted and put in front of real traffic
• ▹Hands-on self-supervised pre-training experience, plus practical fine-tuning and adaptation
• ▹Production experience with model serving, versioning, monitoring and rollback
• ▹Ability to self-manage and drive ambiguous applied research projects with clear communication with partner teams across data science, engineering, product, marketing and external partners
• ▹Strong Python, strong SQL and comfort preparing very large datasets

Nice to have

• ▹Background in fraud, AML, payments, credit or adversarial machine learning
• ▹Experience building and evaluating LLM-based agents in production
• ▹Publications, released models or open source contributions in representation learning or sequence modeling
• ▹Experience with model risk management and documentation in a regulated financial environment

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Generous compensation in cash and equity
• ▹Early exercise for all options, including pre-vested
• ▹Work from anywhere, remote-first culture
• ▹Flexible paid time off and year-end break
• ▹Health, dental and vision coverage for employees and dependents (US and Canada)
• ▹4% 401(k)/RRSP matching (US and Canada)
• ▹MacBook Pro delivered to your door
• ▹One-time home office setup stipend
• ▹Monthly meal stipend and social meet-up stipend
• ▹Annual health and wellness stipend
• ▹Annual learning stipend

About the company

Sardine is an agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime: it stops fraud in real time, prevents AI-driven attacks and automates fraud and AML operations. Its consortium spans more than 6 billion profiled devices, and customers include FIS, GoDaddy, Intuit and Checkout.com.