Senior AI Scientist

A Moving Experience.

What You Will Work On 

• Design and train large‑scale transformer and hybrid foundation models 

• Own model architecture choices across text, multimodal, and emerging paradigms 

• Diagnose and resolve training instabilities at scale 

• Navigate scaling tradeoffs across data and compute 

• Define the technical direction for next‑generation models 

Core Responsibilities 

Deep Learning & Transformer Foundations 

• Apply strong fundamentals in deep learning and representation learning 

• Design and modify transformer architectures, including: 

Attention variants 

• RoPE, ALiBi 

• Grouped Query Attention (GQA) 

• Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) 

• Build models from first principles, not just adapt pre‑existing codebases 

Optimisation Dynamics & Training Stability

• Own optimiser and scheduler choices, including: 

• AdamW 

• Lion 

• Adafactor 

• Learning‑rate and warmup schedulers 

• Understand and debug: 

• Optimiser instability 

• Gradient pathologies 

Scaling Laws & Compute Tradeoffs 

• Apply and validate scaling laws 

• Navigate Chinchilla‑style compute vs data tradeoffs 

• Make informed decisions about model size, dataset size, and training duration 

Loss Functions & Alignment

• Design and experiment with loss functions including: 

• Next‑token prediction 

• Contrastive objectives 

• RLHF, DPO, GRPO 

• Understand how loss design impacts convergence, generalization, and alignment 

Distributed Foundation Model Training

• Design and execute large‑scale training using: 

• FSDP 

• ZeRO‑3 

• Tensor parallelism 

• Pipeline parallelism 

• Apply: 

• Mixed precision (bf16, fp8) 

• Gradient checkpointing 

• Partner closely with ML systems teams​

• What we offer

  We offer a generous compensation and benefits package (in addition to the base salary), including: 

• Salary range $123,500.00 - $197,600.00 USD  It is not typical for offers to be made at or near the top of the range. The actual salary will be determined based on experience and other job-related factors. 

• Annual bonus opportunity 

• Insurance coverage (medical, dental, vision, life, and disability) 

• Paid time off 

• Paid holidays 

• Company contribution to the RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan) 

• Equity awards for certain positions and levels 

• Remote and/or hybrid work available depending on the position   All compensation and benefits are subject to the terms and conditions of the underlying plans or programs, as applicable, and may be amended, terminated, or replaced from time to time. 

Cerence Inc. (Nasdaq: CRNC and www.cerence.com) is the global industry leader in creating unique, moving experiences for the automotive world. Spun out from Nuance in October 2019, Cerence is a new, independent company that has quickly gained traction as a leader in the automotive voice assistant space, working with all of the world’s leading automakers – from Ford and Fiat Chrysler to Daimler, Audi and BMW to Geely and SAIC – to transform how a car feels, responds and learns. Its track record is built on more than 20 years of industry experience and leadership and more than 500 million cars on the road today across more than 70 languages.  

As Cerence looks to the future and continues an ambitious growth agenda, we need someone to join the team and help build the future of voice and AI in cars. This is an exciting opportunity to join Cerence’s passionate, dedicated, global team and be a part of meaningful innovation in a rapidly growing industry. 

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

Cerence is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of age, race, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, sexual orientation, protected military or veteran status, genetic information and other protected classifications. Cerence Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

All prospective and current Employees need to remain vigilant when it comes to executing security policies in the workplace. This includes:

- Following workplace security protocols and training programs to familiarize with the ways to maintain a safe workplace.
- Following security procedures to report any suspicious activity.
- Having respect for corporate security procedures to allow those procedures to be effective.
- Adhering to company's compliance and regulations.
- Encouraging to follow a zero tolerance for workplace violence.

- Basic knowledge of information security and data privacy requirements (e.g., how to protect data & how to be handling this data).

- Demonstrative knowledge of information security through internal training programs.