Sr. Research Scientist

Job Type: Location Type: Remote: open to residents of any country

 

Job Description:

About Rakuten International

Rakuten International is a division of Rakuten Group, Inc., a Japanese global technology leader in services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. Headquartered in San Mateo, California with more than 4,000 employees worldwide, the Rakuten International business portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce, digital marketing, advertising, communications and entertainment. We create products and services that provide exceptional value by aligning members and the businesses that want to engage them in a shared community.

Job Summary:

Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT) is the corporate R&D department of the Rakuten group and is responsible for leading strategic technological progress. RIT’s targets vary from basic technologies to innovative new services. RIT consists of highly motivated research scientists located in Tokyo, Boston, Paris, Singapore, San Mateo and Bengaluru who are driven by strong curiosity.

We are seeking an innovative and dedicated research scientist to join RIT. As a Senior Research Scientist, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of AI within Rakuten’s diverse ecosystem. Our team focuses on enhancing in-house Large Language Models (LLMs) and seamlessly integrating them into Rakuten’s services, impacting millions of users worldwide. We are a collaborative and innovative group, working on cutting-edge research and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing. The ideal candidate will have a passion for producing groundbreaking research, mentoring junior researchers, and collaborating with teams across Rakuten to deliver impactful AI solutions.

Key Responsibilities:

• Drive and execute cutting-edge research to advance the state-of-the-art in generative AI and large language models, contributing to areas including multimodal modeling, domain adaptation, and high-performance small language models.
• Own and pursue an independent research agenda, identifying impactful research problems, designing innovative solutions, and carrying out long-running projects.
• Design and conduct experiments, including experimental design, code development, evaluations, and results analysis, ensuring research outcomes are reusable and impactful.
• Work collaboratively with globally distributed people in a range of roles, including researchers, engineers, product managers, designers, and other key product stakeholders to accomplish complex tasks that deliver value to our business.
• Stay up to date on research and product advances in AI to teach colleagues without research backgrounds state-of-the-art techniques in deep learning and generative AI.
• Mentor junior researchers and promote a healthy, cross-functional team environment.
• Contribute to publications, open-source projects, and knowledge-sharing efforts, enhancing the visibility and reach of research findings.

Qualifications:

• Deep understanding of the latest advancements in deep learning and generative AI, including LLMs, RAG, and AI agents and related areas. Familiarity with current research trends and open challenges in the field.
• Ability to translate complex business challenges into well-defined machine learning tasks, including the creation of novel datasets and evaluation metrics beyond existing benchmarks.
• Strong experimental design skills, with the ability to develop rigorous and objective evaluation methodologies to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed solutions. Experience in analyzing experimental results and drawing meaningful conclusions.
• Expert-level coding skills in Python and PyTorch, with a strong understanding of software engineering principles. Ability to not only fine-tune existing models but also identify and implement improvements to model architectures and training frameworks. Experience in integrating cutting-edge research findings into in-house machine learning libraries.
• Extensive experience in developing and deploying large-scale machine learning models, including distributed training using frameworks such as FSDP and DeepSpeed.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively convey complex technical ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to actively participate in project discussions, provide constructive feedback and technical guidance to junior members.

Minimum Requirements:

• Master’s in computer science, Machine Learning or related field with 5+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Preferred PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning or related field
• Proven experience in a research-focused role within industry, academia, or government institutions.
• Experience in developing software to process a large-scale dataset a distributed computing framework (e.g., Hadoop)
• Demonstrated ability to publish research findings in top-tier peer-reviewed conferences and journals.*
• Being reviewers for the top-tier conferences
• Proven leadership experience in managing and mentoring a team of 3+ researchers and engineers in research and development projects.

Five Principles for Success
Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviors that make Rakuten unique and united across the world. We expect Rakuten employees to model these 5 Shugi Principles of Success.

Always improve, Always Advance – Only be satisfied with complete success – Kaizen
Passionately Professional – Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best
Hypothesize – Practice – Validate – Shikumika – Use the Rakuten Cycle to succeed in unknown territory
Maximize Customer Satisfaction – The greatest satisfaction for our teams is seeing their customers smile
Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! – Always be conscious of time – take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team

Rakuten provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type. Rakuten considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, provincial or local laws.

At the time of posting, Rakuten expects the base compensation for this role to be within the range shown below. Individual compensation will vary based on job-related factors, including the skills, qualifications, and experience of the successful candidate as well as business need and geographic location. The successful applicant for this role will be eligible for discretionary bonus, health, vision, dental insurance, 401k matching, PTO, Volunteer Time Off (VTO), and other employee benefits as the company implements.

USD $121,027.50 – $207,900.00 annually