Principal AI Research Scientist Post-Training Alignment

Position Overview

Autodesk's domains — architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media & entertainment — provide a distinctive research environment: rich structured data, long-horizon reasoning tasks, and real-world evaluation grounded in professional workflows. Uniquely, decades of investment in physics simulation engines, CAD kernels, and computational design tools give us something most labs don't have: high-fidelity, domain-grounded verifiers that can serve as reward signals for post-training. Rather than relying solely on human preference data, we can ground reinforcement learning in the laws of physics and the constraints of real engineering. These are exactly the kinds of challenges — and assets — that make post-training and alignment research here genuinely distinctive.

We publish at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, and SIGGRAPH. We collaborate with leading academic and industry labs. And we have a direct line from research advances to product impact at scale. This is not a role where research sits behind a wall from engineering — you will see your work matter.

Responsibilities

• Post-training for model development — from RLHF and preference optimization to agentic systems and long-horizon reasoning

• Develop novel algorithms that improve model reliability, controllability, and alignment

• Make principled architectural decisions about when to address challenges at the pre-training, post-training, or system level

• Design and run experiments that shape model behavior, robustness, and reasoning quality

• Partner with infrastructure teams to build scalable, reproducible post-training workflows

• Contribute to publications, patents, and Autodesk's external research visibility

• Design evaluation frameworks for long-horizon reasoning, tool use, agentic behavior, safety, and real-world workflow completion

• Lead rigorous model analysis and interpretability efforts

• Drive human-in-the-loop evaluation with high annotation quality and sound scientific methodology

• Establish model readiness criteria and provide go/no-go recommendations for releases

• Communicate technical risks, limitations, and trade-offs clearly to leadership

Minimum Requirements

• Deep hands-on expertise in reinforcement learning for foundation models, and fluency with post-training methods (RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, or adjacent approaches)

• Proven experience leading or mentoring technical research teams — whether in an academic lab, AI research organization, or industry setting

• Strong intuition for model behavior, alignment challenges, and post-training trade-offs

• Experience designing evaluation systems and thinking rigorously about what it means for a model to be ready

• Ability to communicate complex technical trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences

• A PhD or equivalent depth of industry research experience in ML, RL, AI, or a related field

• Experience at a frontier model lab or advanced applied AI organization

• A strong publication record at leading ML or AI venues

• Background in alignment research, preference learning, or agentic AI

• Experience deploying or supporting production AI systems

• Familiarity with large-scale training infrastructure and compute trade-offs

Learn More

About Autodesk

Welcome to Autodesk! Amazing things are created every day with our software – from the greenest buildings and cleanest cars to the smartest factories and biggest hit movies. We help innovators turn their ideas into reality, transforming not only how things are made, but what can be made.

We take great pride in our culture here at Autodesk – it’s at the core of everything we do. Our culture guides the way we work and treat each other, informs how we connect with customers and partners, and defines how we show up in the world.

When you’re an Autodesker, you can do meaningful work that helps build a better world designed and made for all. Ready to shape the world and your future? Join us!

Salary transparency

Salary is one part of Autodesk’s competitive compensation package. For Canada based roles, we expect a starting base salary between $0 and $0. Offers are based on the candidate’s 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.

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