Principal/Staff Applied Research Scientist

Join our team as a Principal/Staff Applied Research Scientist, where you will lead research projects that apply formal methods, program analysis, automated reasoning, and AI-driven techniques to our cloud data platform. You will translate research ideas into prototypes and shipped capabilities, partner closely with engineering leaders and product managers, and influence the engineering and product roadmap. You will also train and uplevel engineering teams on new methods and maintain expertise at the frontier of the field through publications and conference participation.

• Lead research projects that apply formal methods, program analysis, automated reasoning, and AI-driven techniques to real problems in our cloud data platform.
• Translate research ideas into prototypes, then into shipped capabilities that move concrete business metrics — quality, velocity, reliability, and operational performance at scale.
• Partner closely with engineering leaders, product managers, and key customers to identify high-leverage opportunities and turn them into deliverables.
• Depth across the areas this role sits at the intersection of:
• Formal methods — e.g., model checking, theorem proving, SAT/SMT, program verification, type systems, or program analysis
• Demonstrated ability to drive company-level initiatives in partnership with engineering and product leadership. (Weighted more heavily for Principal-level candidates.)
• AI / ML — practical experience applying modern ML, including LLMs, to systems problems such as code generation, synthesis, or automated reasoning
• Software engineering — strong fundamentals; able to go from a research idea to production-quality code in collaboration with engineering teams
• 8+ years applying theoretical computer science to large-scale software systems — ideally cloud data platforms, distributed systems, or developer infrastructure
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment where impact is measured by what ship
• Distributed systems — designing, reasoning about, or verifying large-scale concurrent and distributed systems
• Track record of technical contribution to the field — publications, open-source work, patents, or comparable evidence of impact
• PhD (or equivalent research experience) in Computer Science or a closely related field