---
title: 'AI research scientist at WRITER'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ai-research-scientist-writer-san-francisco-npv52kbw6b49'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# AI research scientist at WRITER

- **Company:** WRITER
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $234k–$349k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-06-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/writer/100b3aec-e337-4df7-998a-479c6d8ea452

## Job description

## 🚀 ABOUT WRITER

WRITER is where the world's leading enterprises orchestrate AI-powered work. Our vision is to expand human capacity through superintelligence. And we're proving it's possible – through powerful, trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams together to unlock enterprise-wide transformation. With WRITER's end-to-end platform, hundreds of companies like Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard are building and deploying AI agents that are grounded in their company's data and fueled by WRITER's enterprise-grade LLMs. Valued at $1.9B and backed by industry-leading investors including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, and ICONIQ Growth, WRITER is rapidly cementing its position as the leader in enterprise generative AI.

Founded in 2020 with office hubs in San Francisco, New York City, Austin, Chicago, and London, our team thinks big and moves fast, and we're looking for smart, hardworking builders and scalers to join us on our journey to create a better future of work with AI.

## 📐 ABOUT THE ROLE

AI research at WRITER isn't just about publishing papers — it's about building the scientific foundation that powers some of the most ambitious enterprise AI deployments in the world. As an AI research scientist, you'll be at the center of that work. You'll drive a high-impact research agenda focused on large language models, agentic reasoning, and the system-level capabilities that make AI genuinely useful at enterprise scale. This is a rare opportunity to do research that matters twice over — advancing the field and shipping directly into products used by hundreds of thousands of people every day.

We're at an inflection point. Enterprises are moving from experimenting with AI to deeply embedding it across their operations, and WRITER's models are the engine making that possible. The work you do here — on post-training, planning, multi-step reasoning, and agentic workflows — will directly shape how the next generation of enterprise AI behaves, performs, and scales. You'll have the resources, infrastructure, and cross-functional support to pursue ambitious ideas and bring them to life quickly.

This role is hybrid, based out of our San Francisco or New York City hub. You'll report to our VP of AI research.

*Please note: role is open to Senior, Staff, and Sr. Staff applicants

## 🦸🏻‍♀️ WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Lead an independent, high-impact research agenda on large language models and agentic systems, owning projects from early hypothesis through model training, evaluation, and production deployment
- Design and execute large-scale post-training experiments using supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), RLAIF, DPO, and emerging alignment techniques — with a focus on improving multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use in enterprise agentic workflows
- Build novel evaluation benchmarks and methodologies that push beyond existing limitations, establishing rigorous measures for how well models perform on complex, real-world enterprise tasks
- Develop scalable data synthesis and curation pipelines that generate the high-quality training signal driving model improvement — including LLM-as-judge frameworks, synthetic data generation, and adversarial dataset construction
- Shape WRITER's model architecture and training roadmap by translating your research insights into concrete improvements to our enterprise-grade LLMs, working hand-in-hand with research engineering and product teams
- Publish and present original research at top-tier venues — NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, and others — representing WRITER at the frontier of the field and contributing to the broader scientific community
- Mentor and uplevel fellow researchers and engineers on the team, helping set a high bar for scientific rigor, experimental design, and research culture

## ⭐️ WHAT YOU NEED

- 7+ years of hands-on ML research experience, with deep expertise in large language model pre-training and post-training — you've trained models at scale, debugged distributed jobs, and shipped improvements that made a measurable difference
- A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, or a related field — or equivalent demonstrated research experience with a strong portfolio of independent, published work
- Expert-level knowledge of post-training methods including SFT, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, GRPO, and related alignment and reasoning techniques, with a track record of applying them to real, production-grade systems
- Strong command of Python and PyTorch (or JAX), with the engineering depth to build and scale training pipelines, evaluation infrastructure, and data synthesis workflows yourself — not just direct others to do it
- A meaningful publication record at competitive ML/AI venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, or equivalent), evidencing your ability to originate ideas and execute on a multi-month research agenda independently
- Hands-on experience designing or evaluating agentic systems — models that plan, reason through multi-step tasks, use tools, and recover gracefully from errors — with a nuanced understanding of where they break and how to fix them
- The instincts and orientation that match WRITER's values: you Connect — you collaborate openly across research, engineering, and product and communicate complex ideas with clarity to both technical and non-technical audiences; you Challenge — you ask the hard questions, push back on conventional wisdom, and pursue the research directions others haven't tried yet; you Own — you drive your projects end-to-end with urgency, take accountability for results, and care deeply about the impact your work has on real customers

🍩 Benefits & perks (US Full-time employees)

- Generous PTO, plus company holidays
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family
- Paid parental leave for all parents (16 weeks)
- Fertility and family planning support
- Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri https://www.galleri.com/partner/writer
- Flexible spending account and dependent FSA options
- Health savings account for eligible plans with company contribution
- Annual work-life stipends for:
- Wellness stipend for gym, massage/chiropractor, personal training, etc.
- Learning and development stipend
- Company-wide off-sites and team off-sites
- Competitive compensation, company stock options and 401k

WRITER is an equal-opportunity employer and is committed to diversity. We don't make hiring or employment decisions based on race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other basis protected by applicable local, state or federal law. Under the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

By submitting your application on the application page, you acknowledge and agree to WRITER's Global Candidate Privacy Notice https://writer.com/legal/candidate-privacy-notice/.

## About WRITER

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: WRITER provides an enterprise AI platform that enables organizations to build, activate, and supervise AI agents grounded in company data and powered by its own family of large language models (LLMs).
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C; $326M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2020
- **Founders**: May Habib (CEO) & Waseem AlShikh (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Enterprise AI / Generative AI Software Development
- **Target Customers**: B2B; Large enterprises in regulated industries (e.g., financial services, healthcare, professional services). Named customers include Accenture, Mars, Marriott, Uber, and Vanguard.
- **Mission Statement**: To expand human capacity through superintelligence by building trustworthy AI that unites IT and business teams for enterprise-wide transformation.

## Products & Services
- **WRITER Platform**: An end-to-end platform for building, deploying, and monitoring AI agents that are grounded in enterprise data and governed by IT controls. Includes an "AI Studio" for custom agent creation.
- **WRITER Agent**: A delegation-based agent that executes complex, multi-step workflows from natural language instructions (e.g., drafting reports, conducting research, generating compliant content).
- **Palmyra Family of LLMs**: WRITER’s own suite of purpose-built LLMs, designed for transparency, reliability, and control in regulated environments.
- **Security & Compliance Integrations**: Pre-built integrations with enterprise security, identity, and observability stacks (e.g., SSO, audit logs, role-based access controls) to meet compliance standards.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (total funding of $326M).
- **Key Metric**: Annual recurring revenue (ARR) estimated at $26M (source: LinkedIn company profile).
- **Notable Investors**: Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Insight Partners, Balderton Capital, B Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount of ~727 employees (+33.1% YoY); operates in 42 countries; LinkedIn followers grew +35.7% YoY to ~88k; expanding office footprint with hubs in San Francisco, New York, London, Chicago, and Austin.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Five-year track record of in-house LLM R&D**: Co-founders have been building AI for enterprise since 2013 (first company focused on machine translation). WRITER controls its own model stack, not just a wrapper on third-party APIs.
- **Enterprise-first DNA**: Platform is built from the ground up for governance, compliance, and IT integration — a key differentiator in regulated industries.
- **Purpose-built for agentic workflows**: Unlike generic chatbot platforms, WRITER focuses on autonomous, multi-step task execution with deep domain context.
- **Strong partner ecosystem**: Backed by a consortium of strategic investors including Salesforce, Adobe, Citi, and IBM, signaling deep enterprise channel potential.

## Strategic Focus
- **Agentic AI for the enterprise**: Moving beyond simple prompting to autonomous agents that can be delegated complex tasks.
- **Deepening IT and security integrations**: Making it easy for security and compliance teams to approve and deploy AI at scale.
- **Expanding AI research**: Continuing to invest in the Palmyra family of LLMs to maintain frontier capabilities.
- **Global expansion**: Growing presence across North America and Europe (offices in SF, NY, London, Chicago, Austin).

## Why Work Here
- **Hybrid culture**: The company is built around a mix of in-office collaboration and remote work. Offices are in San Francisco, New York, and London (plus Chicago and Austin).
- **Ownership mindset**: All employees receive company stock options, plus a 401k plan with employer contributions.
- **Growth opportunities**: "Expect to quickly improve your skills and expand your responsibilities" — learning and development stipend and generous PTO are provided.
- **Cutting-edge technical challenges**: Teams build advanced AI technology from scratch, solving problems few other companies tackle.
- **Comprehensive benefits**: Employer-covered medical, dental, and vision plans; life insurance; FSA; competitive parental leave; family-friendly policies.
- **Strong values-driven culture**: Emphasizes active listening, high standards, long-term thinking, and diverse perspectives.
- **Active hiring**: Multiple open roles across engineering, product, sales, and customer success (see careers page).

## Sources
1. [writer.com/about](https://writer.com/company/about/)
2. [writer.com](https://writer.com/)
3. [writer.com/careers](https://writer.com/company/careers/)
4. [LinkedIn Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/getwriter)
5. [Ashby Careers Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/writer)

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