AI Experimental Systems Research Scientist; Causal Learning & Adaptive Experimentation

Overview

AI Experimental Systems Research Scientist (Causal Learning & Adaptive Experimentation)

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Mers Around the World

3M is a place where you can collaborate with curious, creative colleagues across diverse locations, technologies and products. This position provides an opportunity to transition from other sectors into a 3M career.

As an AI Experimental Systems Research Scientist in 3M’s Corporate R&D organization, you will work on a small, technically focused team developing foundational methods for always-on learning systems that reason, experiment, and adapt in complex, non-stationary environments. These systems aim to preserve identifiability, causal validity, and epistemic calibration.

You will collaborate with researchers across statistics, cognitive science, and machine learning to design systems where experimentation, inference, and uncertainty are integral to the learning process. This is not a conventional data science or applied machine learning role. The work focuses on how learning systems structure experiments, manage interference and delayed effects, govern representations, and remain epistemically correct over time.

This role suits someone who enjoys working from first principles, designing rigorous experimental machinery, and translating statistical theory into systems that operate continuously in the real world.

• Designing and implementing adaptive experimental systems that operate continuously under nonstationarity, interference, and delayed or indirect outcomes.
• Developing causal estimands, randomization schemes, and inference procedures whose primary goal is identifiability and validity, not just reward optimization.
• Embedding rigorous experimental control into learning systems, including experimentation on the system’s own learning mechanisms, parameters, and representational choices.
• Translating principles from experimental design, causal inference, and sequential decision-making into robust, always-on system behavior.
• Working from whiteboards, research discussions, and evolving specifications, not fixed product requirements or static datasets.
• Implementing and maintaining research code that supports hierarchical experimentation, baseline control streams, and statistically valid online inference.
• Creating diagnostics, monitoring tools, and guardrails to ensure learning systems remain calibrated and avoid stabilizing spurious structure over time.
• Collaborating with interdisciplinary researchers to stress-test experimental learning mechanisms under realistic, adversarial conditions.

To set you up for success in this role from day one, 3M requires (at a minimum) the following qualifications:

• Ph.D. in Statistics, Biostatistics, Economics, Computer Science, Data Science, Operations Research, or a closely related field (completed and verified prior to start).
• Deep grounding in experimental design and statistical inference, including randomized experiments and causal estimands.
• Demonstrated ability to implement research-grade statistical or experimental methods in a general-purpose programming language (e.g., Python).
• Experience working in research settings where problem definitions evolve and correctness takes precedence over convenience.

• Experience with adaptive or sequential experimentation (e.g., response-adaptive trials, causal bandits, best-arm identification).
• Familiarity with causal inference frameworks spanning both design-based and model-based approaches.
• Strong intuition for identifiability, bias–variance tradeoffs, and statistical validity in complex, real-world settings.
• Experience with nonstationary systems, concept drift, or delayed feedback loops.
• Experience reasoning about interference, carryover effects, time-varying treatments, or non-independent experimental units.
• Comfort designing experiments where the learning process itself is the object under experimental control.
• Familiarity with hierarchical or clustered experimental designs and multi-level inference.
• Interest in foundational questions about how autonomous systems…