Research Scientist, Research

About This Role

This Research Scientist role is within the User Modeling and Personalization Research Team, focusing on inventing new ways to model user behavior and building user-centric ML systems for personalized experiences across Snap. The work involves generative and language models for information retrieval, efficient large-scale recommender systems, and representation learning for structured graph data.

Responsibilities

• Lead research projects in the user modeling and personalization domains, including generative modeling, recommendation systems, information retrieval, and efficiency
• Build scalable research prototypes and evaluate them in large-scale machine learning scenarios
• Share expertise with teammates and interns
• Publish findings at top conferences
• Partner with engineering teams to deliver technology to millions of Snapchatters

Requirements

• Strong technical knowledge of machine learning, information retrieval, personalization, and state-of-the-art deep learning literature
• Demonstrated ability in defining, leading and executing challenging research projects
• Strong computer science fundamentals, problem-solving and engineering skills (Python, PyTorch)
• Pragmatic, hands-on approach to research with a drive to build working prototypes rather than solely rely on theoretical exploration
• Proven ability to mentor interns, students and junior researchers
• PhD in a related technical field such as computer science, machine learning, or mathematics or equivalent years of practical work experience
• Strong familiarity with PyTorch, and hands-on experience with distributed (multi-node and multi-GPU) machine learning model training, inference and experimentation
• Experience applying language models in the context of generative search, ranking and/or personalization
• Track record of publications (first-author preferred) in top machine learning, information retrieval or language venues (e.g. ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, RecSys, SIGIR, WSDM, ACL, COLM, etc.)

Nice to have:

• Experience with large-scale machine learning problems in an academic or industrial research lab, or equivalent open-source experience
• Experience with large-scale data processing, collection or synthesis using machine learning frameworks on Enterprise Cloud solutions like Google Cloud, AWS, and/or Azure
• Familiarity with post-training, preference optimization, working with large-scale search or recommendation interaction data, and recommender systems
• Demonstrated ability to transform cutting-edge research into tangible product improvements

Benefits

• Paid parental leave
• Comprehensive medical coverage
• Emotional and mental health support programs
• Compensation packages that let you share in Snap’s long-term success
• Equity in the form of RSUs

Important Details

• Work format: in office 4+ days per week

About the Company

Snap Inc. is a technology company that believes the camera presents the greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate. It operates Snapchat, Specs Inc., Bitmoji, Saturn, and other digital services. Snap Research serves as an innovation engine for the company, with projects ranging from enhancing existing products to exploring fundamental paradigm shifts in communication and expression.