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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

Minimum Qualifications

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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

About Autodesk

Welcome to Autodesk! Amazing things are created every day with our software – from the greenest buildings and cleanest cars to the smartest factories and biggest hit movies. We help innovators turn their ideas into reality, transforming not only how things are made, but what can be made.

We take great pride in our culture here at Autodesk – it’s at the core of everything we do. Our culture guides the way we work and treat each other, informs how we connect with customers and partners, and defines how we show up in the world.

When you’re an Autodesker, you can do meaningful work that helps build a better world designed and made for all. Ready to shape the world and your future? Join us!

Benefits

From health and financial benefits to time away and everyday wellness, we give Autodeskers the best, so they can do their best work. Learn more about our benefits in the U.S. by visiting https://benefits.autodesk.com/

Salary is one part of Autodesk’s competitive compensation package. For U.S.-based roles, we expect a starting base salary between $175,300 and $302,500. Offers are based on the candidate’s experience and geographic location, and may exceed this range. In addition to base salaries, our compensation package may include annual cash bonuses, commissions for sales roles, stock grants, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Equal Employment Opportunity

At Autodesk, we're building a diverse workplace and an inclusive culture to give more people the chance to imagine, design, and make a better world. Autodesk is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and considers all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic. We also consider for employment all qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.

Diversity & Belonging

We take pride in cultivating a culture of belonging where everyone can thrive. Learn more here: https://www.autodesk.com/company/diversity-and-belonging

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