Platform - ML R&D - Principal Research/Data Scientist

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What is The Role:

The R&D ML team is responsible for training, testing and optimizing a set of models and pipelines used across the whole stack. As a model architecture lead for retrieval and reranking, you will lead the design and post-training strategies of our next generations of in-house models that will be integrated in our product. While our current generation of models are text only, we plan to add multi modality in the near future.

This is an outstanding opportunity to lead our effort and contribute to shipping the upcoming generation of Elastic’s models, which will then be served to our broad userbase.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Strategic research & technical roadmap definition: identify promising new technologies for text-only and multi-modal models, look into post-training methodologies relevant for retrieval and re-ranking, and champion solutions that will fit best in Elastic.
• Tooling: improve our infrastructure and help scale to accommodate larger models: provide expert guidance on distributing data preparation, training and testing on multiple GPUs, help design, improve and write specs for our compute infrastructure
• Model variants exploration: investigate applying fine-tuning, quantization, distillation and other techniques to existing or upcoming models.
• Technical leadership: foster a culture of innovation and rigorous experimentation, coordinate knowledge sharing within the team; act as a senior technical authority and go-to expert for the modeling, training and testing challenges; mentor more junior members of the team helping them develop their skills and knowledge
• Communication: interact with various leads across the organization, communicate sophisticated concepts to high profile stakeholders, adjust and iterate on the roadmap according to internal and external inputs.

What You Bring:

• Excellent comprehension of the industrial and academic state of the art on xLMs, more specifically in retrieval and reranking techniques
• Extensive professional experience in designing, training, and debugging various model architectures as well testing and implementing post-training strategies; proven track record of assessing, proposing and integrating frontier techniques to large scale products.
• 6+ years of professional software development experience in Python (pytorch).
• Experience with large-scale model training (between 0.1 and 7B parameters), distributed training, and model optimization techniques (e.g., quantization, pruning, efficient attention mechanisms).
• Excellent communication skills and gentle approach to leadership
• Strong attention to detail and highly organized

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People:

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions, and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to creating an inclusive culture that celebrates different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation.

We welcome individuals with disabilities and strive to create an accessible and inclusive experience for all individuals. To request an accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email candidate_accessibility@elastic.co. We will reply to your request within 24 business hours of submission.

Applicants have rights under Federal Employment Laws and can view the following posters linked below:

Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Poster

Employee Polygraph Protection Act (EPPA) Poster

Elasticsearch develops and distributes technology and information that is subject to U.S. and other country export controls and licensing requirements for individuals who are located in or are nationals of the following sanctioned countries and regions: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, the Crimea Region of Ukraine, the Donetsk People’s Republic (“DNR”), and the Luhansk People’s Republic (“LNR”). If you are located in or are a national of one of the listed countries or regions, an export license may be required as a condition of your employment in this role. Please note that national origin and/or nationality do not affect eligibility for employment with Elastic.

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Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component.

The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below. In select locations (including Seattle WA, Los Angeles CA, the San Francisco Bay Area CA, and the New York City Metro Area), an alternate range may apply as specified below.

These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the ranges may be modified in the future.

An employee's position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Elastic believes that employees should have the opportunity to share in the value that we create together for our shareholders. Therefore, in addition to cash compensation, this role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program. Our total rewards package also includes a company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings, along with a range of other benefits offered with a holistic emphasis on employee well-being.

The typical starting salary range for this role is:

$159,800—$252,800 USD

The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is:

$191,900—$303,500 USD