Lead Applied Scientist | Search, NLP & RAG
Kadence is partnered with a globally recognised software company in the US. We're looking for a Lead Applied Scientist to push the boundaries of search and language AI. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who lives and breathes information retrieval, NLP, and retrieval-augmented generation, someone who can architect end-to-end search and RAG system.
What You'll Do
- Design and own search, IR, and RAG architectures that power AI-driven products at scale
- Apply context engineering, retrieval strategies, and model evaluation to build systems that actually perform in production
- Advise leadership on long-term search and AI strategy
- Partner closely with Product, UX, and Engineering to turn customer problems into shipped search/NLP solutions
- Stay at the cutting edge of IR, NLP, and RAG, through publications, patents, or product wins
- Mentor scientists and engineers, raising the bar on search and retrieval expertise across the team
- Represent the team at top-tier conferences (SIGIR, ACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, and more)
What You Bring
- PhD (or Master's + equivalent experience) in a relevant field
- 7+ years building search, IR, RAG, or NLP systems that ship, not just research
- Deep expertise in information retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation, with a strong grasp of modern NLP techniques
- A velocity-first mindset: you'd rather build a working search/RAG solution in a workshop than perfect a slide deck
- Strong production coding chops and software delivery discipline
- A track record of translating messy, complex problems into search and NLP products that work
- Experience leading through others in an applied research environment
- Sharp communication skills - you can talk to scientists and stakeholders alike
Compensation target: $200k - $240k (plus RSU, Benefits, bonus)