Senior Principal Software Scientist

Cerence Inc.

Senior Principal AI Scientist designing and training transformer models at Cerence AI. Leading AI innovations for the automotive industry with a focus on generative AI and large-scale systems.

Posted 7/3/2026full-timeRemote • Massachusetts • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $185,000 - $280,000 per yearWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design and train large-scale transformer and hybrid foundation models
Own model architecture choices across text, multimodal, and emerging paradigms
Diagnose and resolve training instabilities at scale
Navigate scaling tradeoffs across data, compute, and architecture
Define the technical direction for next-generation models
Apply strong fundamentals in deep learning and representation learning
Design and modify transformer architectures, including: Attention variants, RoPE, ALiBi, Grouped Query Attention (GQA), Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)
Build models from first principles, not just adapt pre-existing codebases
Own optimizer and scheduler choices, including: AdamW, Lion, Adafactor
Understand and debug optimizer instability, gradient pathologies, divergence at large scale
Validate scaling laws and navigate compute vs. data tradeoffs

Requirements

What you’ll need

Strongly Required: Deep theoretical and practical understanding of modern deep learning
Hands-on experience training large models from scratch
Ability to reason about optimization, not just tune hyperparameters
Comfort operating in ambiguous, research-driven environments
Critical Technical Skills: Transformer internals and attention mechanisms
Optimization algorithms and training dynamics
Scaling laws and compute/data tradeoffs
Distributed training strategies and mixed precision
Architecture innovation for large, real-world models

Benefits

Comp & perks

Annual bonus opportunity
Insurance coverage (medical, dental, vision, life, and disability)
Paid time off
Paid holidays
Company contribution to the RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan)
Equity awards for certain positions and levels
Remote and/or hybrid work available depending on the position

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

Deep LearningTransformer ArchitecturesAttention MechanismsOptimization TechniquesModel TrainingGradient PathologiesMixed Precision TrainingScaling TradeoffsModel Architecture InnovationTraining Dynamics

Soft Skills

Problem SolvingAdaptabilityCritical Thinking