Principal Scientist Jobs in Santa Clara, CA

INTRODUCTION

Partners with science, engineering, and product experts and leaders to identify strategic business and product needs, and drives and plans the identification of solutions to address product and/or business problems. Leads the design and execution of research programs; surveying state of the art, preparing high-quality datasets, running POCs/experiments, and designing, training, and optimizing ML/AI models and solution architectures. Guides technical teams to deliver and deploy solutions into production, and ensures delivered solutions successfully solve product and/or business problems. Participates in the research community by publishing and presenting research findings and serving as a keynote speaker.

Key Responsibilities

Solution Identification:

• Partners with science, engineering, and product experts and leaders to establish processes for teams to identify and address strategic business and product needs related to the use of machine learning (ML) and/or artificial intelligence (AI).

• Evaluates the literature and market to understand the difficulty and scope of problems. Leverages understanding and expertise to break down problems for others.

• Sets science quality standards for the Line of Business (LOB), and leads the end-to-end execution of science strategy to address product and/or business problems.

• Drives and plans the identification and prioritization of solutions based on the scientific process (e.g., including modeling approaches, evaluation techniques, data collections).

• Identifies opportunities to apply delivered solutions across product and/or business problems.

Solution Development – Applied Research:

• Ensures research proofs-of-concept (POCs) or research experiments are designed to validate proposed solutions, gather robust supporting evidence, and assess the risks and rewards of solutions. Gains buy-in for applied research.

• Leverages subject matter expertise to establish criteria used to select and prepare datasets for use in applied research. Provides expert review of datasets to ensure high quality data is being leveraged and addresses gaps in the data.

• Leads the design and execution of research programs on new theories, tools, and methodologies to transfer and apply state-of-the-art technologies into products and services or make advancements in the field.

Solution Development:

• Guides the design, development, and optimization of ML and AI technologies, such as model training/fine-tuning and computation optimizations.

• Leverages subject matter expertise to refine the architecture of ML and AI solutions, such as data, model, training, and evaluation, employing best practices.

Solution Development – Articulating Research Insights:

• Identifies meaningful insights from highly complex data and metadata sources from analysis and experiments.

• Interprets and communicates insights and findings throughout Oracle.

• Leads the creation of patents, white papers, or other technical documentation related to applied research outcomes.

Solution Delivery – Coding and Documentation:

• Evaluates and offers guidance on high-complexity code written by team and properly maintains and organizes existing codebase.

• Establishes best practices for version control, code review, and code delivery/deployment and guides less experienced team members.

• Builds, maintains, and reviews professional documentation for technical processes (experimentation, data collection and analyses, model building).

• Owns the repository for the team.

Solution Delivery:

• Guides technical teams to ensure the successful and timely delivery of solutions and integration of services.

• Ensures successful collaboration with software engineers and/or machine learning engineers to deploy solutions into production environments.

• Leads the peer review of solutions prior to delivery.

• Coordinates the delivery of solutions with applied science team members.

• Ensures delivered solutions successfully solve product and/or business problems.

• Guides the definition of operational and user feedback metrics and analyzes metrics to inform the technical strategy of the LOB.

• Facilitates partnerships with operational teams to evaluate and monitor solutions in production.

Building Research Capability – Research Excellence:

• Demonstrates expertise and thought leadership within Oracle in at least one business-critical applied research technology area.

• Leverages subject matter expertise to apply and guide others to apply domain knowledge and industry best practices to applied research.

Building Research Capability – Research Community Presence:

• Leads the publication, presentation, and review of research findings and papers in top-tier conferences, research and industry outlets, etc.

• Serves as a keynote speaker in conferences or panels.

• Participates in the scientific community by providing peer review and feedback.

• Establishes collaboration with external research labs in industry, where plausible, or academia.

Core Responsibilities

Planning & Execution:

• Manages and provides direction on timelines, deliverables, and budgets when applicable for critical high-impact projects or initiatives that impact the line of business, ensuring timely completion and adherence to requirements.

• Anticipates and plans for shifts in resources or timelines based on changing business priorities, ensuring optimal outcomes.

Collaboration & Partnership:

• Influences cross-functional leaders and external stakeholders to gain alignment on strategic objectives.

• Fosters partnerships with key business leaders, stakeholders, and/or customers, identifying opportunities for expanding partnerships and promoting long-term organizational success.

• Champions transparency and inclusivity by actively seeking, listening to, and incorporating diverse perspectives.

Problem Solving:

• Leads specialized, advanced problem-solving efforts, serving as an escalation point for complex issues.

• Guides others to leverage innovative data-driven techniques to address ambiguous or novel issues, identify root causes, and drives the implementation of solutions that prevent future issues.

Continuous Learning:

• Leverages deep industry knowledge and expertise to serve as a thought leader within the organization.

• Contributes to the advancement of the field or industry through thought leadership (e.g., conference presentations, white papers, research contributions).

• Maintains and evolves expertise in relevant areas by proactively monitoring emerging trends, technologies, and industry standards, ensuring the organization remains current with best practices.

• Champions continuous learning and knowledge sharing, promoting professional development across teams.

• Applies new knowledge to drive advancement and mentors others to do the same.

Continuous Improvement:

• Develops innovative solutions and drives the implementation of ideas that increase the efficiency and effectiveness of processes, protocols, and workflows across the organization.

• Evaluates effectiveness of updated approaches and methods for continued improvement to enhance efficiencies and ensure changes align with organizational goals.

• Designs and develops metrics to measure success of improvement initiatives.

Performance and Development:

• Serves as a subject matter expert regarding talent needs and organizational talent strategy.

• Imparts leadership and expert knowledge throughout the talent development pipeline including candidate interviews, candidate assessment, and hiring decisions, ensuring alignment with organizational talent strategy.