{"id":29282,"url":"https://alion.io/job/phrase-principal-ai-researcher","title":"Principal AI Researcher","company":{"id":7968,"name":"Phrase","domain":"phrase.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/phrase","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":116000,"max_usd":289000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":1286},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon SageMaker","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"DPO","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Flyte","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Gemini","optional":false},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LoRA","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"NLP","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"Pre-training","optional":false},{"name":"Prefect","optional":false},{"name":"Pydantic AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"TGI","optional":false},{"name":"Vertex AI","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"Weights & Biases","optional":false},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"PEFT","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-18T11:31:25Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-18","last_verified_at":"2026-11-15T15:26:53Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":150,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":148},"description":"Principal AI Researcher\nAt Phrase, we help open the door to global business by providing the world's leading Language Intelligence Platform.\nThe Phrase Platform combines AI, agentic orchestration, and a headless, API-first architecture in one composable system. Beyond translation, it orchestrates and adapts content to culture, audience, channel, brand voice, and intended outcome in any language, for every audience. It applies the context that makes content perform in every market: quality standards, glossaries, prior translations, and cultural nuance. Every team, in every region, can ship content that is on-brand, on-point, and ready for any audience.\nPhrase gives enterprises the intelligence to automate workflows, the freedom to connect their own tools and engines, and the control to govern global content at scale.\nThe AI Research team sits at the core of Phrase’s product differentiation. We build, train, and evaluate proprietary translation models; we design the agentic workflows that orchestrate translation quality end-to-end; and we run the research cadence that feeds product development with grounded, evidence-based decisions.\nThe team’s current research programmes span: fine-tuning LLMs for domain-specific machine translation, multi-agent evaluation pipelines, automated quality profiling from style guides, and active learning through feedback loops on real customer data. These are not exploratory proofs of concept; they are live systems serving production traffic.\nThe next phase requires someone who can take ownership of the most technically demanding of these streams, extend them, and help chart the research direction for the team as a whole.\nWhat you’ll be responsible for:\nCore Research\nLead design, training, and evaluation of LLMs for translation and language quality tasks, including work with fine-tuning techniques such as LoRA and DPO, and instruction-tuned models at various scales.\n\nDesign and implement robust evaluation frameworks for translation quality, moving beyond automatic metrics (BLEU, TER, ChrF, MQM, COMET), LLM-as-judge approaches, and hybrid evaluation pipelines.\n\nArchitect and evaluate complex agentic workflows for NLP problems: multi-step reasoning, tool use, structured output generation, and orchestration across multiple model providers.\n\nTake technical ownership of the team’s flagship model development programme, from data curation and training pipeline design through to production integration and ongoing evaluation.\n\nDesign and run experiments using ML pipelines, maintaining reproducibility and clear documentation of results and decisions.\n\nApplied NLP and Product Collaboration\nWork closely with Product, Engineering, and Solutions to translate research findings into concrete, shippable capabilities.\n\nProvide expert input on model provider strategy: evaluation of frontier models (OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, open-source), benchmarking against internal baselines, and recommendations on production use.\n\nContribute to the evolution of quality evaluation systems, including integration of style guides, and a focus on customer-led, outcome-oriented metrics and evaluation methodologies.\n\nSupport decisions on active learning, feedback loop design, and data pipeline strategy for continuous model improvement.\n\nTeam and Leadership\nAct as a technical lead for the research team: setting direction on open problems, reviewing PRs and research write-ups, running or contributing to internal enablement sessions such as reading groups, deep dives etc.\n\nMentor junior and mid-level researchers; model good research hygiene and collaborative working practices.\n\nContribute to hiring decisions for the team, including take-home assignment design and technical interviews.\n\nRepresent the AI Research team in cross-functional forums and with external stakeholders where research credibility matters.\n\nWhat We’re Looking For\nMust have\nDeep, hands-on experience building and training LLMs or large transformer-based models: pre-training, fine-tuning, RLHF/DPO, or equivalent.\n\nStrong background in NLP, with demonstrable expertise in at least one of: machine translation, MT evaluation, information extraction, text generation, search optimization, or reinforcement learning.\n\nProven ability to design, implement, and critically evaluate agentic systems: tool-calling agents, multi-agent pipelines, or LLM-orchestrated workflows at scale.\n\nExperience designing and running rigorous evaluation frameworks, including both automatic metrics and human-in-the-loop eval design.\n\nStrong Python skills and experience with ML/NLP libraries (Hugging Face, PyTorch, vLLM, or similar); familiarity with workflow orchestration tools such as Flyte, Prefect, or Airflow.\n\nPhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, or a related field, OR equivalent research experience demonstrated through publications, open-source contributions, or significant applied research output.\n\nStrongly Preferred\nIndustry experience working on production NLP systems, not just academic research: shipping models, handling data pipelines, monitoring quality in live traffic.\n\nFamiliarity with the localization and machine translation domain: translation quality metrics (MQM, COMET), post-editing workflows, segment-level quality signals, or TMS integrations.\n\nExperience with multi-LLM ensemble architectures or model routing strategies.\n\nTrack record of publishing or presenting at top NLP venues (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, NeurIPS, ICLR).\n\nExperience with experiment tracking tools (Weights & Biases), model serving frameworks (vLLM, TGI), and cloud-based ML infrastructure (AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI).\n\nExperience with PydanticAI, LangGraph, or similar frameworks for building structured agentic pipelines.\n\nPrior experience in a technical lead or staff research role; evidence of mentoring or growing other researchers.\n\nCharacter and Working Style\nProduct-minded: you think about research in terms of what it enables and who it serves, not just whether the numbers went up.\n\nA natural driver: you identify open problems, propose directions, and move work forward without waiting to be pushed.\n\nCollaborative and open: you share results early, invite challenge, give credit generously, and build on others’ work.\n\nPrecise but not precious: you care about rigour and reproducibility without losing sight of practical impact.\n\nGrowth-oriented: you are motivated by the prospect of building and leading a team, not just doing individual research.\n\nGenerative: you bring new ideas to the table, not just rigorous execution of known approaches; intellectual curiosity and a willingness to pursue directions that might not work are as important to us as technical depth.\n\nWhat you’ll get:\nWork experience in a successful and growing global SaaS company\n\nBe part of an international team in Europe, APAC, and the Americas\n\nExpert colleagues in their field who are determined to build the best localization platform on the market, creating a world where language never limits opportunity\n\nAn agile work environment, where it is encouraged to take smart risks\n\nTake part in a culture full of trust, support and loyalty, where respectful and open feedback is valued, and diversity is fully embraced\n\nA positive, open-minded, and innovative atmosphere\n\nSupport in your professional development and personal career goals\n\nWhat's on top:\n4 Company holidays additional to your regular holidays (1 day per quarter where the entire company is off to celebrate our achievements).\n\nIn addition, the company also provides employees with a Christmas break to allow you to spend time with family and friends without use of your vacation allocation.\n\nYour birthday is off because it is important to celebrate you as well.\n\n2 Giveback days where you can support the local community, volunteer, and/or participate in charity events and activities.\n\nProfessional and extensive onboarding.\n\nLearning & development through Phrase learning\n\nAdditional local benefits depending on the entity you're hired at, just ask your Talent Acquisition Partner\n\nAt Phrase we believe in the critical importance of diversity in all its forms and intersectionalities, and are committed to ensuring that the people we interview reflect this diversity. We therefore strongly encourage people of any identity to apply for our exciting career opportunities. We have taken an active decision to make our work environment inclusive every day, starting at the very beginning of your Phrase experience.\nWe value and welcome different perspectives, experiences and backgrounds as we believe that these differences make our team even stronger on our mission of opening the door to global business by giving everybody access to the content they need in the language they speak.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8763,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Professional development"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Natural Language Processing","Workflow & Process Automation (RPA, BPM)","Translation Services"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-06-18T11:31:25Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.316,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":149,"expected_fill_days":31,"reasons":["conf:4","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-15T07:52:55Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/phrase-principal-ai-researcher","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/phrase-principal-ai-researcher.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-15T22:56:11Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":19350,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-16T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":7968},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=7968"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fphrase-principal-ai-researcher"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"free","price":{"credits":0,"usd":0},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fphrase-principal-ai-researcher"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fphrase-principal-ai-researcher"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/phrase-principal-ai-researcher\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fphrase-principal-ai-researcher"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":29282}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"phrase.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":29282},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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