About the job
As an AI Scientist Manager at Autodesk Research, you will be doing fundamental and applied research that will help our customers imagine, design, and make a better world. We are seeking an AI Scientist Manager to lead our post-training and model alignment efforts. This role sits at the critical intersection of advanced AI research, people leadership, and model readiness. You will both manage and grow a team of AI scientists and personally contribute as a hands-on researcher, owning the transformation of foundation models into reliable, aligned, and production-ready systems. This is not a purely managerial role. You will remain deeply technical while setting direction, making trade-offs, and taking accountability for model behavior at release.
Responsibilities
Lead and contribute directly to post-training pipelines, including:
Instruction tuning and multi-task fine-tuning
Preference optimization (RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, and related methods)
Domain-specific post-training and specialization for the AECO, Manufacturing, and Media & Entertainment industries
Design and run experiments that shape model behavior, robustness, and reliability
Decide what problems are best addressed through post-training vs pre-training vs product-level mitigation
Partner with infrastructure teams to ensure efficient, reproducible, and scalable post-training workflows
Design and maintain evaluation frameworks that measure:
Long-horizon reasoning and planning
Tool-use and agentic behavior
Safety, robustness, and alignment
Regression and behavioral drift across releases
Lead human-in-the-loop evaluation, ensuring annotation quality, consistency, and bias awareness
Provide clear go / no-go recommendations for model releases, including explicit articulation of known risks and trade-offs
Manage, mentor, and grow a team of AI scientists working on post-training and alignment
Set clear technical direction while empowering researchers to own end-to-end projects
Hire and develop scientists with strengths across ML, RL, evaluation, and human-centered AI
Foster a culture of:
Rigorous experimentation and ablation
Reproducibility and scientific integrity
Thoughtful risk-taking and humility about model behavior
Provide regular feedback, career coaching, and performance management
Act as a key interface between:
Pre-training research
Infrastructure and compute teams
Model Delivery team
Safety, policy, and legal stakeholders
Translate complex research trade-offs into clear, decision-ready guidance for leadership
Influence the broader AI roadmap by identifying post-training opportunities that unlock product impact
Qualifications
Minimum
PhD or equivalent industry experience in Machine Learning, AI, or a related field
Proven experience as a people manager of technical research or ML teams
Strong hands-on expertise in:
Large language models or foundation models
Fine-tuning and post-training methods
Preferred
Experience operating in an AI research lab or frontier model organization
Background in human-in-the-loop systems, preference learning, or alignment research
Experience shipping or supporting production AI systems
Familiarity with large-scale training infrastructure and compute cost trade-offs
Experience in Architecture, Civil or Mechanical Engineering, Construction, Manufacturing, Media & Entertainment or other Autodesk domains