Applied Scientist (AI/ML), New Venture (Senior to Staff level)

At Sanity.io, we’re building the future of AI-powered Content Operations. Our AI Content Operating System gives teams the freedom to model, create, and automate content the way their business works, accelerating digital development and supercharging content operations efficiency. Companies like SKIMS, Figma, Riot Games, Anthropic, COMPLEX, Nordstrom, and Morningbrew are using Sanity to power and automate their content operations.

As part of our new venture, your work will center on addressing one of AI’s toughest problems: how to help machines truly understand and use human-created content. You’ll build systems that structure and enrich large volumes of information to enable AI agents and LLMs to access the right context at the right time. This means designing and developing tools and pipelines that shape, structure, and connect information and content in innovative ways, and creating new methods to ensure AIs reflect the most accurate, authentic, and up-to-date representation of a business, its brand, products, and knowledge base.

As a Senior Applied Scientist you'll lead the innovation and research that powers our next generation of AI capabilities. You'll be the technical visionary who invents novel algorithms and methodologies for how AI systems understand and utilize content, then takes those innovations all the way to production. Your work will span from deep research into LLM behavior and evaluation to designing cutting-edge architectures and knowledge graph systems. You'll join a small, cross-functional team where you'll lead the AI technical direction, exploring new approaches independently and bringing breakthrough ideas back to the team for collaborative implementation. If you're passionate about pushing the boundaries of what's possible with LLMs, love the challenge of inventing new solutions to hard problems, and can bridge the gap between research and production, we'd love to have you on the team.

What you will do:

• Lead research and development of novel approaches for content understanding, structuring, and retrieval to enable AI agents and LLMs to access optimal context.

• Research and prototype novel approaches to knowledge graph construction, entity extraction, and relationship mapping for AI-powered content systems.

• Stay at the forefront of LLM research, understanding model behaviors, limitations, and capabilities to inform system design decisions.

• Develop evaluation frameworks and metrics to measure and improve the performance of AI systems, including designing experiments to test new methodologies.

• Design and conduct experiments to validate new approaches, analyzing results and iterating based on findings.

• Keep up with the latest research in LLMs, RAG, knowledge graphs, and related fields, translating cutting-edge academic work into practical applications.

• Collaborate closely with data engineers and full stack engineers to integrate innovative AI solutions into the product.

About you:

• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and able to work at least 2 days per week in our San Francisco office.

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, applied AI/ML research, or a related technical field, with a strong track record of taking ideas from concept to production.

• 2+ years of hands-on experience working with large language models (LLMs) or building AI-powered applications.

• Deep expertise in large language models (LLMs), including understanding of model architectures, training methods, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and evaluation techniques.

• Strong background in Natural Language Processing (NLP), information retrieval, and semantic understanding.

• Experience with knowledge graphs, graph databases, entity extraction, and relationship mapping.

• Strong software engineering skills with the ability to write production-quality code and take research prototypes to scalable implementations.

• Ability to work independently on exploratory research while also collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams.

• Strong analytical and experimental mindset - you love designing experiments, analyzing results, and iterating based on data.

• Excellent problem-solving skills and intellectual curiosity about how things work under the hood.

• Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Comfortable with ambiguity and excited about working on undefined problems that require creative solutions.

What we can offer:

• A highly skilled, inspiring, and supportive team.

• Positive, flexible, and trust-based work environment that encourages long-term professional and personal growth.

• A global, multi-culturally team of colleagues and customers.

• Comprehensive health plans and perks.

• A healthy work-life balance that accommodates individual and family needs.

• Competitive salary and stock options program.

• Base Salary Range: $240,000 - $275,000 annually. Final compensation within this range will be determined based on the candidate’s experience and skill set.

Who we are:

Sanity.io is a modern, flexible content operating system that replaces rigid legacy content management systems. One of our big differentiators is treating content as data so that it can be stored in a single source of truth, but seamlessly adapted and personalized for any channel without extra effort. Forward-thinking companies choose Sanity because they can create tailored content authoring experiences, customized workflows, and content models that reflect their business.

Sanity recently raised a $85m Series C led by GP Bullhound and is also backed by leading investors like ICONIQ Growth, Threshold Ventures, Heavybit and Shopify, as well as founders of companies like Vercel, WPEngine, Twitter, Mux, Netlify and Heroku. This funding round has put Sanity in a strong position for accelerated growth in the coming years.

You can only build a great company with a great culture. Sanity is a 200+ person company with highly committed and ambitious people. We are pioneers, we exist for our customers, we are hel ved, and we love type two fun! Read more about our values here!

Sanity.io pledges to be an organization that reflects the globally diverse audience that our product serves. We believe that in addition to hiring the best talent, a diversity of perspectives, ideas, and cultures leads to the creation of better products and services. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or gender identity.