Principal/Staff Applied Research Scientist

• We’re hiring at both the Staff and Principal level; we’ll calibrate the offer to the candidate’s experience and scope of impact
• Lead research projects that apply formal methods, program analysis, automated reasoning, and AI-driven techniques (including code generation and modeling) to real problems in our cloud data platform
• Translate research ideas into prototypes, then into shipped capabilities that move concrete business metrics — quality, velocity, reliability, and operational performance at scale
• Partner closely with engineering leaders, product managers, and key customers to identify high-leverage opportunities and turn them into deliverables
• Influence the engineering and product roadmap; advise leaders on which research directions are pragmatic and which are not
• Train and uplevel engineering teams on new methods, and scale those methods across the organization
• Maintain expertise at the frontier of the field through publications, conference participation, open-source contributions, and patent filings

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance plans
• Health savings accounts
• Robust retirement plans
• Life and disability insurance
• Weekly online lunch and learns
• Virtual workout classes
• Ergonomic work-from-home equipment
• On-demand mental health and wellness programs
• Fertility benefits and family planning resources
• Generous time-off and various leave plans
• Onsite and Remote Work
• Employee discounts and pre-tax selections
• New hire equity + Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Quarterly bonus or commission program- Depth across the areas this role sits at the intersection of:
• Formal methods — e.g., model checking, theorem proving, SAT/SMT, program verification, type systems, or program analysis
• Demonstrated ability to drive company-level initiatives in partnership with engineering and product leadership. (Weighted more heavily for Principal-level candidates.)
• AI / ML — practical experience applying modern ML, including LLMs, to systems problems such as code generation, synthesis, or automated reasoning
• Software engineering — strong fundamentals; able to go from a research idea to production-quality code in collaboration with engineering teams
• 8+ years applying theoretical computer science to large-scale software systems — ideally cloud data platforms, distributed systems, or developer infrastructure
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment where impact is measured by what ship
• Distributed systems — designing, reasoning about, or verifying large-scale concurrent and distributed systems
• Track record of technical contribution to the field — publications, open-source work, patents, or comparable evidence of impact
• PhD (or equivalent research experience) in Computer Science or a closely related field