Staff Research Scientist, AI Agents & LLMs

Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs This Staff Research Scientist role sits squarely in a defining shift in SaaS: product platforms moving from analytics and automation toward agentic systems that can reason over enterprise data and take actions. Snowflake’s positioning as a cloud data platform makes the research unusually close to real customer workloads, where model quality must be balanced with latency, cost, and reliability rather than benchmark performance alone. For a SaaS career, the standout value is the mandate to connect frontier LLM and agent research with production systems. Work spanning model development, retrieval and grounding, evaluation standards, and inference and training infrastructure builds an end to end understanding of how AI capabilities become durable platform features. The emphasis on setting research direction and translating breakthroughs into shipping systems aligns with how senior technical leaders influence SaaS roadmaps. This is best suited to researchers who prefer ownership over narrow contribution, and who are motivated by constraints typical of enterprise SaaS deployments. It will fit someone comfortable operating across disciplines, from applied ML to systems considerations, and who wants their work to be judged by measurable behavior in real product environments as well as scientific contribution. The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.

Job Description

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. THE MISSION We are seeking a Staff Research Scientist to serve as a technical pillar within our AI research organization. You will not just execute on roadmaps—you will define them. At the intersection of autonomous agents and large language models (LLMs), you will build the models and systems that turn enterprise data into self-directed, decision-making agents—shifting from passive data access to autonomous execution. Our team operates at the frontier of enterprise AI, delivering both state-of-the-art models and production systems, including:

• Arctic LLM: Enterprise foundation models optimized for performance and efficiency
• Arctic-Text2SQL: Post-trained reasoning models with frontier-level quality at a fraction of cost and latency
• Snowflake Intelligence: Brought research to production through agentic innovations in multi-step reasoning, Deep Research for structured and unstructured insights, and system optimization
• Arctic Inference: High-performance LLM serving stack (Shift Parallelism, SwiftKV), open-sourced and powering Snowflake Cortex
• Arctic Long-Context Training: Enables 1M+ token context training on a single H200 GPU
• Agent World Models (AWM): RL training across 1,000+ synthetic environments for tool-using agents

We focus on core challenges such as reliable reasoning, long-horizon planning, grounded generation, and scalable model and agent development. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

• Define research direction in Agentic AI and LLMs
• Develop models: train, fine-tune, and align models for enterprise reasoning and tool use
• Advance autonomous agents: drive state-of-the-art capabilities in multi-step reasoning and tool use
• Advance the stack: retrieval, grounding, memory, and multi-agent coordination
• Establish evaluation standards for reliability, safety, and efficiency
• Drive research breakthroughs into production within Snowflake’s platform
• Mentor and lead to amplify the team’s technical impact
• Contribute to the field through publications and open source

WE’RE LOOKING FOR:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field with a strong publication record
• Expertise in LLM development (training, fine-tuning, alignment, or post-training)
• Experience with agentic systems (multi-agent systems, tool use, or agent optimization)
• Strong systems thinking under real-world constraints (latency, cost, reliability)
• Proven technical leadership and end-to-end ownership
• Ability to translate research into impactful systems

WHY SNOWFLAKE? Frontier AI, Full Stack Work across the full stack—from foundation models (Arctic LLM, Arctic Text2SQL) to agent systems (Snowflake Intelligence) and inference/training infrastructure (Arctic Inference, Arctic Training). State-of-the-Art, Real Impact Drive cutting-edge research that ships—powered by massive enterprise data and production workloads. Hard, Meaningful Problems Build autonomous systems for reliable reasoning over enterprise data—where correctness, cost, and latency all matter. Open Research Culture Publish, open-source, and help shape the field. Snowflake is growing fast, and we are scaling our team to accelerate AI innovation. Are you ready to build the brain for the Enterprise Data Cloud? Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee's duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com Apply To This Job