Senior Research Scientist
Cambridge, MA
Kensho
Kensho develops cutting-edge products and technologies that transform businesses. We are the AI Innovation Hub for S&P Global.At Kensho, we hire talented people and give them the freedom, support, and resources needed to accomplish our shared goals. We believe in flexibility-first and give our employees the opportunity to work from where they feel most productive and engaged (must be in the United States). We also value in-person collaboration, so there may be times when travel to one of our Kensho hubs (e.g., Cambridge, MA or NYC) will be required for team meetings or company events.
About the R&D Lab:Since 2022, we have been building a world-class R&D lab comprised of NLP Research Scientists, and we heavily prioritize publishing in top-tier conferences. Our small team has demonstrated compelling results and is fueling innovation throughout Kensho and S&P Global at large. Specifically, we are continuously developing Large Language Models (LLMs) and are actively working on long-context question-answering (QA), complex reasoning, tokenization, alignment (e.g., factuality), multi-document QA, and more!
Our small team has reserved access to hundreds of fast GPUs (A100s), spanning Cloud and on-prem machines.
Our current projects include:- Long-context document QA, where the answer is contained within documents that are hundreds of pages in length [1]- Complex reasoning, including better understanding and improving models’ ability to approximate numbers (related to commonsense reasoning).- Creating rigorous evaluation benchmarks, spanning domain knowledge, quantity extraction, and program synthesis [2]- Improving existing alignment techniques for domain-specific needs, while also addressing factuality- Dissecting tokenizers to better understand how each of the sub-components impact intrinsic and extrinsic performance [3][4]- Multi-Document QA where the answer requires combining information from dozens of sources.- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods- Creating high-quality data filters for LLM development
Additionally, we maintain strong relationships with academia, including collaborating on several ongoing projects, providing industry grants, sponsoring conferences, and jointly holding faculty positions.[1] DocFinQA: A Long-Context Financial Reasoning Dataset (Reddy et al., 2024)[2] BizBench: A quantitative reasoning benchmark for business and finance (Koncel-Kedziorski et al., 2024)[3] Tokenization Is More Than Compression (Schmidt et al., 2024)[4] Greed is All You Need: An Evaluation of Tokenizer Inference Methods (Uzan et al., 2024)
What You'll Do:
- Regularly reading late-breaking research papers and helping to identify the most promising problems to pursue
- Serving a leading role on a research project
- Developing novel, state-of-the-art NLP models that can scale to millions of documents
- Working closely with other Research Scientists and ML Engineers
- Writing clean, readable research code in PyTorch (not expected to write production-level code)
- Contribute to a stellar engineering culture that values excellent design, documentation, testing, and code
- Share your research results with your colleagues (presentations) and the world (published papers, patents, and blog posts)
Who You Are:
- Hold a PhD in Computer Science or related field
- Have several years of post-PhD research experience in industry or academia
- Have a strong publication record with top-tier ML/NLP conferences (e.g., ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML)
- Are proficient in writing code in PyTorch, Tensorflow, or JAX
- Experience with leading research projects with others (e.g., last-author papers), including directing the vision and providing regular feedback
- Have experience with the techniques required to work effectively with large, messy real-world data
- Prefer to collaborate iteratively on hard problems with your teammates rather than spending stretches of time working alone and presenting your results intermittently
- Have a love for learning new skills and domainsAre excited to share knowledge freely, proactively, and effectively with others who are interested (e.g., participate in our Reading Group)
- Are a generous teammate who takes work seriously without taking yourself too seriously
Technologies We Love at Kensho:
- ML: PyTorch, Weights & Biases, NetworkX
- Deployment: Airflow, Docker, EC2, Kubernetes, AWS
- Datastores: Postgres, Elasticsearch, S3
* Salary range is an estimate based on our AI, ML, Data Science Salary Index 💰
Tags: Airflow ASR AWS Classification Computer Science Docker EC2 Elasticsearch EMNLP Engineering Excel Finance ICML JAX Kubernetes LLMs Machine Learning NeurIPS NLP PhD Physics PostgreSQL PyTorch R RAG R&D Research Statistics TensorFlow Testing Unstructured data Weights & Biases
Perks/benefits: Career development Conferences Flex vacation Health care Medical leave Parental leave Pet friendly Startup environment Team events Unlimited paid time off
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