Principal Scientist, Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models (2-year LTE*)

About the position

The Gates Foundation is the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we're committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally. Joining the Gates Foundation provides unique opportunities to work with global-health policymakers, to collaborate with world-class researchers and non-profit organizations, and to help to save and improve the lives of people around the world. We are committed to enabling and accelerating the robust use of artificial intelligence and language models for positive and lasting change in global health and development.

Responsibilities

• Develop strategic AI initiatives at the foundation
• Identify knowledge or data gaps in settings in which we work and propose solutions
• Envision innovative framings of problems to simplify work and cut to essential issues
• Prototype innovative solutions to demonstrate what is possible in the rapidly evolving AI field
• Provide subject matter expertise, strategic counsel, and operational insights to the AI and LLM efforts across the foundation
• Establish trusted relationships with internal and external entities, such as academic institutions and industry partners
• Collaborate with topic experts, field partners, and in-country policy makers to build the right solutions to the most important problems
• Clearly communicate sophisticated methods to diverse audiences

Requirements

• PhD in applied mathematics, machine learning, natural language processing, or computational linguistics, with 10 years of professional experience
• Recognized as an expert within and outside of the organization in the field of artificial intelligence
• Demonstrable ties to industry applications, including technology startups, established affiliate positions within corporations such as Microsoft Research, Nvidia, Amazon, or Google
• Track record of scientific, peer-reviewed publications including publications in a top-tier ML/NLP conference (e.g., ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML), and/or patented inventions
• Ability to think of projects at the multi-year scale, while also engaging with rapidly moving projects and flexible explorations
• Proficiency in writing code for DL/ML/AI applications, i.e., Python, PyTorch, Tensorflow, Java, JAX, etc.
• Experience prototyping innovative solutions that demonstrate what is possible to accomplish with AI
• Experience building, training, and adapting LLMs for customized applications applying on-premise and cloud-based hosting platforms
• Experience with the open-source AI community for deep learning and large language models is a plus
• Ability to be adaptable to changing technologies, to working on a diverse set of use cases, to working with different types of partners, and in different settings
• Knowledge of disease control and public health issues in low-income countries is a plus

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums
• Generous paid time off
• Paid family leave
• Foundation-paid retirement contribution
• Regional holidays
• Opportunities to engage in several employee communities