Applied Research Manager

arrow

New York / $250000 - $275000 annum

INFO

Salary
SALARY:

$250000 - $275000

Location

LOCATION

New York

Job Type
JOB TYPE

Permanent

Manager of Applied Research - AI Center of Excellence

Locations: Hybrid in New York, NY | Eagan, MN | Frisco, TX (relocation available)

Compensation: $250-270k base | $400k+ total comp with RSUs + annual bonus

Role Overview

We are seeking a technically strong Manager of Applied Research to join our client's AI Center of Excellence and lead innovation across advanced NLP, ML, and LLM-driven systems. This is a hybrid player/coach position: you will directly contribute to building applied AI solutions while leading a small team of researchers and engineers. The role requires deep experience with modern large language models, retrieval systems, and agentic frameworks, as well as a track record of bringing cutting-edge research into production environments at scale.

Key Responsibilities

  • Lead and mentor a research team while contributing hands-on to the development of ML/NLP/LLM-based legal and knowledge-domain products.
  • Define and implement technical strategy across the AI lifecycle: from data acquisition, fine-tuning, and evaluation to deployment, observability, and governance.
  • Drive innovation in LLM-based architectures, including Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), hybrid search systems, knowledge graph integration, and agentic workflows.
  • Establish best practices for model evaluation, monitoring, and compliance, particularly in regulated industries (legal, financial, tax, or related domains).
  • Collaborate closely with global stakeholders in product, engineering, and UX to ensure research outcomes translate into measurable customer impact.
  • Stay ahead of the field in applied research, contributing thought leadership externally (e.g., publications, conferences) and internally (e.g., protocol design, innovation roadmaps).

Qualifications

  • MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related field.
  • 7+ years of professional experience, with at least 2 years in a player/coach leadership capacity managing technical contributors.
  • Proven success in moving AI/ML research from experimentation to production systems.
  • Expertise in large language models: fine-tuning, building evaluation frameworks, developing with RAG pipelines, hybrid retrieval, and integrating agentic systems (LangChain, LangGraph, Pydantic AI, etc.).
  • Strong background in Python development; proficiency with additional languages such as Java or Scala are a plus.
  • Hands-on knowledge of MLOps & infrastructure, including containerization, real-time inference pipelines, model observability, governance, and deployment in AWS and/or Azure.
  • Experience in environments where compliance, auditability, and interpretability matter (legal, tax, banking, regulated enterprise software).
  • Familiarity with building and scaling microservices for ML applications.
  • Research mindset: demonstrated by publications in top-tier venues (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, SIGIR, KDD) or equivalent contributions to the field.
  • Strong ability to communicate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences and translate research into business and customer impact.

CONTACT

Gabriella Varela

Recruitment Consultant

SIMILAR
JOB RESULTS

4k-Harnham_DA copy
CAN’T FIND THE RIGHT OPPORTUNITY?

STILL
LOOKING?

If you can’t see what you’re looking for right now, send us your CV anyway – we’re always getting fresh new roles through the door.