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Position Overview As an AI Scientist Manager Reinforcement Learning at Autodesk Research, you will be doing fundamental and applied research that will help our customers imagine, design, and make a better world. We are seeking an AI Scientist Manager to lead our posttraining and model alignment efforts. This role sits at the critical intersection of advanced AI research, people leadership, and model readiness. You will both manage and grow a team of AI scientists and personally contribute as a handson researcher, owning the transformation of foundation models into reliable, aligned, and productionready systems. This is not a purely managerial role. You will remain deeply technical while setting direction, making tradeoffs, and taking accountability for model behavior at release. Key Responsibilities Technical Leadership & HandsOn Research Lead and contribute directly to posttraining pipelines, including instruction tuning and multitask finetuning, preference optimization (RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, and related methods), domainspecific posttraining and specialization for the AECO, Manufacturing, and Media & Entertainment industries. Design and run experiments that shape model behavior, robustness, and reliability. Decide what problems are best addressed through posttraining vs pretraining vs productlevel mitigation. Partner with infrastructure teams to ensure efficient, reproducible, and scalable posttraining workflows. Evaluation, Alignment & Model Quality Design and maintain evaluation frameworks that measure longhorizon reasoning and planning, tooluse and agentic behavior, safety, robustness, and alignment, and regression and behavioral drift across releases. Lead humanintheloop evaluation, ensuring annotation quality, consistency, and bias awareness. Provide clear go / nogo recommendations for model releases, including explicit articulation of known risks and tradeoffs. People Management & Team Development Manage, mentor, and grow a team of AI scientists working on posttraining and alignment. Set clear technical direction while empowering researchers to own endtoend projects. Hire and develop scientists with strengths across ML, RL, evaluation, and humancentered AI. Foster a culture of rigorous experimentation and ablation, reproducibility and scientific integrity, thoughtful risktaking and humility about model behavior. Provide regular feedback, career coaching, and performance management. CrossFunctional & Organizational Leadership Act as a key interface between pretraining research, infrastructure and compute teams, model delivery team, safety, policy, and legal stakeholders. Translate complex research tradeoffs into clear, decisionready guidance for leadership. Influence the broader AI roadmap by identifying posttraining opportunities that unlock product impact. Qualifications Minimum Qualifications PhD or equivalent industry experience in Machine Learning, AI, or a related field. Proven experience as a people manager of technical research or ML teams. Strong handson expertise in large language models or foundation models, finetuning and posttraining methods (e.g., RLHF, DPO, instruction tuning), experimental design and evaluation. Ability to move fluidly between research depth and organizational leadership. Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex tradeoffs to technical and nontechnical audiences. Preferred Qualifications Experience operating in an AI research lab or frontier model organization. Background in humanintheloop systems, preference learning, or alignment research. Experience shipping or supporting production AI systems. Familiarity with largescale training infrastructure and compute cost tradeoffs. Experience in Architecture, Civil or Mechanical Engineering, Construction, Manufacturing, Media & Entertainment or other Autodesk domains. What Success Looks Like Posttrained models demonstrate measurable improvements in reliability, alignment, and usefulness. Evaluation metrics are trusted and adopted across teams. The team consistently delivers highquality research and practical impact. Leadership relies on your judgment for model readiness and risk assessment. Team members grow into strong, independent researchers and leaders. Benefits From health and financial benefits to time away and everyday wellness, we give Autodeskers the best, so they can do their best work. Learn more about our benefits in the U.S. by visiting Salary transparency Salary is one part of Autodesks competitive compensation package. For U.S.-based roles, we expect a starting base salary between $192,600 and $344,850. Offers are based on the candidates experience and geographic location, and may exceed this range. In addition to base salaries, our compensation package may include annual cash bonuses, commissions for sales roles, stock grants, and a comprehensive benefits package. Equal Employment Opportunity At Autodesk, were building a diverse workplace and an inclusive culture to give more people the chance to imagine, design, and make a better world. Autodesk is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and considers all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic. We also consider for employment all qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with applicable law. Diversity & Belonging We take pride in cultivating a culture of belonging where everyone can thrive. Learn more here: