AI Data Scientist

Our Company

At Teradata, we believe that people thrive when empowered with better information. That’s why we built the most complete cloud analytics and data platform for AI. By delivering harmonized data, trusted AI, and faster innovation, we uplift and empower our customers—and our customers’ customers—to make better, more confident decisions. The world’s top companies across every major industry trust Teradata to improve business performance, enrich customer experiences, and fully integrate data across the enterprise.

We are seeking a Staff AI Data Scientist to provide technical leadership and strategic direction for training and fine‑tuning language models across Teradata’s AI platform. This role goes beyond individual execution—you will define best practices, influence architecture decisions, and mentor senior engineers
, while still remaining hands‑on with critical model training efforts. You will:

• Define and lead the LLM/SLM training strategy
  , including model selection, data strategy, and alignment approaches.
• Architect scalable and reusable training and evaluation pipelines for instruction tuning, preference optimization, and synthetic data workflows.
• Establish evaluation standards and benchmarks for model quality, hallucination reduction, safety, and reliability across teams.
• Drive adoption of efficient fine‑tuning and inference optimization techniques (PEFT, quantization, distillation) at platform scale.
• Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to influence training and serving architecture
  , GPU utilization, and cost efficiency.
• Mentor senior and mid‑level data scientists and engineers; raise the overall bar for model quality and engineering rigor.
• Act as a technical advisor to product and leadership on LLM capabilities, limitations, and trade‑offs.
• Track cutting‑edge research and proactively translate it into practical, enterprise‑ready solutions
  .

You’ll collaborate with a world‑class team of AI architects, ML engineers, and domain experts in Silicon Valley, working together to build the next generation of enterprise AI systems. You’ll also work cross‑functionally with:

• Product managers and UX designers to craft agentic workflows that are intuitive and impactful.
• Domain specialists to ensure solutions align with real‑world business problems in regulated industries.

Required:

• B.S./M.S./Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, or a related technical field.
• Deep expertise in PyTorch, Transformers, and LLM training workflows.
• Proven experience designing end‑to‑end model training and evaluation systems.
• Strong ability to influence technical decisions across teams.

Preferred:

• 6+ years of experience in ML / NLP, including LLM/SLM training at scale.
• Deep hands‑on experience with SFT, DPO/RL‑based alignment
  , and PEFT methods.
• Hands‑on experience with fine‑tuning methods, including full parameter updates and PEFT (LoRA/QLoRA).
• Experience with distributed training and inference at scale.
• Track record of technical leadership, mentorship, or cross‑team impact.

We prioritize a people‑first culture because we know our people are at the very heart of our success. We embrace a flexible work model because we trust our people to make decisions about how, when, and where they work. We focus on well‑being because we care about our people and their ability to thrive both personally and professionally. We are committed to actively working to foster an inclusive environment that celebrates people for all of who they are.