# Principal Applied AI Scientist – LLM Post-Training & Evaluation

- Link: https://accel-dna.com/jobs/principal-applied-ai-scientist-llm-fine-tuning/
- Published: 2026-10-22T22:06:22+00:00
- Author: Umar Mahmud

## Opportunity Overview

**Location:** 100% Remote (United States)
**Employment Type:** Full-Time Direct-
Hire via Accel DNA**Compensation Range:** $215,000 – $255,000 Base + Significant
Equity Grant**Hiring Agency:** Accel DNA – Premier Frontier Data & AI Talent Partner

An elite cybersecurity defense enterprise is hiring a **Principal Applied AI Scientist**
to head private model post-training, specialized domain adaptation, and adversarial
safety alignment. You will take raw open-weight foundation models and build proprietary,
industry-leading specialized models.

## Key Responsibilities:

 * Lead the post-training strategy for specialized open-weight models using Supervised
   Fine-Tuning (SFT), DPO (Direct Preference Optimization), and RLHF.
 * Design programmatic synthetic data generation pipelines, quality filtering, and
   deduplication workflows using frontier models and rejection sampling.
 * Develop comprehensive automated evaluation benchmarks measuring reasoning fidelity,
   hallucination rate, and adversarial safety vulnerabilities.
 * Publish research findings and represent the organization at premier AI conferences(
   NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR).

## What You Bring:

 * PhD or MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, or
   related quantitative field.
 * 5+ years of applied research experience with a track record of fine-tuning, aligning,
   and deploying large-scale neural architectures (Transformers).
 * Proficiency with distributed training frameworks (DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM, FSDP,
   PyTorch, Hugging Face TRL).
 * Deep passion for empirical evaluation and model alignment methodologies.

## How to Apply:

Submit your CV and published research links to [contact@accel-dna.com](https://accel-dna.com/jobs/principal-applied-ai-scientist-llm-fine-tuning/contact@accel-dna.com)
or connect with our executive search team at [https://accel-dna.com/contact-us/](https://accel-dna.com/contact-us/).