Machine Learning Scientist, New AI Products and Platforms

Company Mission

The New York Times is dedicated to pursuing truth and enhancing public understanding through independent journalism. Our renowned newsroom delivers reporting from nearly 160 countries, focusing on broad content formats spanning print, audio, digital, and apps. Our business strategy prioritizes creating journalism that is high-quality and worth paying for.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Machine Learning Scientist to join the New A.I. Products & Platforms team, responsible for shaping innovative reader-centric AI experiences for one of the world's most trusted news organizations. This position involves developing embedding models and retrieval algorithms, designing and training representation learning models, and fine-tuning language models to enrich content and support various custom applications. Reporting to the Director of Machine Learning, this role offers a hybrid work setup combining remote and onsite work from New York, NY.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and train embedding models leveraging transformer encoders and Two Tower architectures for representation learning.
• Fine-tune and evaluate language models to meet custom use cases and enhance content.
• Contribute to organizational standards for evaluation, responsible AI practices, and defining quality criteria amid a culture valuing independent judgment.
• Implement and deploy machine learning and AI research solutions emphasizing robustness, reproducibility, and balanced consideration of risks and trade-offs.
• Innovate by adapting or creating machine learning and AI algorithms when existing methods fall short, favoring straightforward and effective approaches.
• Effectively communicate complex ML and AI concepts across diverse teams, including engineering, analytics, product management, marketing, editorial, and executive leadership.
• Support and exemplify the company's core values of journalistic independence and commitment to truth and public education.

Minimum Qualifications

• PhD, or a Master's degree plus at least 2 years of professional experience, or over 3 years of relevant work experience in machine learning, statistics, computational social science, applied mathematics, or related quantitative/computational fields.
• At least 2 years working with open-source machine learning or statistical tools.
• Proficiency with Python programming for a minimum of 2 years.
• Experience of more than 2 years in using SQL and processing large structured or unstructured datasets for analysis.
• At least 1 year of practical knowledge with deep learning architectures, fine-tuning models, embeddings, and frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.

Preferred Qualifications

• 1+ year experience with information retrieval or search system implementations.
• 1+ year experience translating vague business queries into well-defined machine learning problems.
• 1+ year experience creating data products, either for internal use or consumer audiences.

Compensation and Benefits

The role offers an annual base salary ranging from 121000 to 141000 USD. For U.S. employees, variable pay components such as bonuses and restricted stock units may be available. Benefits include medical, dental, vision coverage, Flexible Spending Accounts, company-matched 401(k), paid vacation, sick leave, parental leave, tuition assistance, and professional development programs. Benefits details for international employees will be shared during the interview process.

Additional Information

Applicants must submit original work without using generative AI tools for substantive content creation during application and interviews. Specific guidelines on allowable AI tools will be communicated during assessments for engineering candidates.

The New York Times is committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive workforce and provides equal employment opportunities without discrimination based on legally protected characteristics. Reasonable accommodations for applicants needing assistance during recruitment are available upon request.

The company encourages applicants with criminal histories by following applicable fair chance laws and prioritizes privacy and security of applicant data.

Applicants should beware of fraudulent job postings impersonating the company; The New York Times does not solicit payments or financial information from candidates.