AI Research Manager/Scientist, Post-training

Job Requisition ID #

26WD94883

Position Overview

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.

Autodesk's AI Lab is active in the wider research community, targeting publications at CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, SIGGRAPH, and other top-tier conferences. We collaborate with top academic & industry labs, combining the best of an academic environment with product-guided research. We are a global team, located in London, San Francisco, Toronto, and remotely in the US, Canada, and Europe.

This role will report to Director of AI Research in the AI Lab.

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

• 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 (e.g., RLHF, DPO, instruction tuning), experimental design and evaluation
• Ability to move fluidly between research depth and organizational leadership
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences

• 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