Research Scientist - Salesforce AI Research

The Experience
Salesforce AI Research is a global leader in Enterprise AI, driving innovations that advance the state of AI while powering enterprise products at worldwide scale.

Our research has helped shape multiple generations of modern AI: we helped pioneer prompt engineering through DecaNLP; introduced BLIP, a foundational breakthrough in multimodal AI; trained state-of-the-art large language models including CodeGen; and pioneered foundation models for time series with Moirai. Today, we continue to advance the frontier of enterprise AI through innovations in AI simulation environments like eVerse, our simulation and agent-training environment; the Atlas Reasoning Engine, which powers Agentforce reasoning capabilities; and other AI systems that are redefining how enterprises reason, plan, and act.

What makes our team unique is our ability to take ideas from research to real-world impact at scale. We work closely with product teams and enterprise customers to translate cutting-edge research into production AI capabilities used by millions of users. Our innovations continue to shape the future of Salesforce products and the broader enterprise AI ecosystem. We also continue to publish at the world's top AI conferences, open source influential research, and collaborate with leading academic institutions. Learn more at Salesforce AI Research.

We are looking for entrepreneurial Research Scientists who want to build, ship, and scale the next generation of Enterprise AI. This is not a traditional research role - you work like a founder within Salesforce, identifying high-impact research directions, prototyping cutting-edge AI capabilities, validating ideas directly with customers, and turning the strongest concepts into production-ready solutions. You have the freedom to propose and incubate new research ideas, access Salesforce's global customer and product ecosystem, and quickly validate new innovations with external and internal customers and stakeholders. We are looking for people who are comfortable with ambiguity, move with urgency, and care as much about customer adoption as technical innovation. If you want the pace and ownership of a startup, combined with the reach and resources of Salesforce, this role offers a unique opportunity to build Enterprise AI with global impact.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Identify research directions with the potential to transform Enterprise AI.

• Turn promising ideas into zero-to-one AI product prototypes.

• Work directly with customers to validate needs, test solutions, and refine product direction.

• Build robust models, agents, and AI systems for real-world enterprise use.

• Partner with product, engineering, and go-to-market teams to bring solutions to market.

You're Our Person If...

• You have a strong publication record at top AI venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ICCV, ACL, EMNLP) and/or a proven track record of shipping AI research into real-world products.

• You have experience with Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or DeepSpeed.

• You are motivated by real-world impact - you care about seeing your research leave the lab and reach users at scale.

• You bring demonstrated expertise in one or more core focus areas:

  • Agentic AI and Reasoning: LLM-powered agents, reinforcement learning (RL), reasoning and planning, autonomous workflows, computer use agents, deep research agents, and coding agents.

  • Multimodal and Computer Vision: Vision-language models, video understanding, and multimodal AI agents.

  • Speech Intelligence: Voice intelligence, text-to-speech/automatic speech recognition, and low-latency audio processing.

  • Core Modeling and Post-Training: Pre-training and post-training techniques including RLHF and direct preference optimization, model distillation, evaluation, and time series modeling.

• You bring a demonstrated ability to conduct independent research and translate ideas into impactful systems.

Even Better If...

• You have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical field - or equivalent full-time industry experience in deep learning research or product.

• Experience building and scaling ML models for real-world business applications.

• Experience mentoring and advising other researchers.

• Strong programming skills (competitive programming, e.g. ACM-ICPC, or open source experience).

• Thoughtful about responsible AI, trust, and the real-world impact of the systems you build.

• Fantastic problem solver - ability to tackle challenges the world hasn't solved before.

• Excellent written and spoken communication skills.

• Demonstrated track record of cultivating strong working relationships and driving cross-functional collaboration.