Job Requisition ID #

26WD94883

Research Lead / Principal Scientist & Manager

Post-Training · Alignment · Reinforcement Learning

Autodesk AI Lab: London · San Francisco · Toronto · Remote (US/CA/EU)

The Opportunity

Foundation models are reshaping how engineers, architects, and designers work-but training foundation models that are reliable, domain-capable systems is still an open research problem.

Autodesk touches more of the physical world than almost any other software company. The products we build are used to design skyscrapers, manufacture aircraft, and produce films. AI is now central to how those workflows are evolving — and post-training is the layer that makes the difference between a capable model and one that is dependable and robust in our customers’ high-precision domains.

As Research Lead for Post-Training & Alignment, you will own Autodesk's research strategy for transforming foundation models into systems that are reliable, aligned, and genuinely useful in complex, domain-specific workflows. This is a deeply technical leadership role — you will shape research direction, drive key architectural decisions, and remain close to the work.

You will lead a growing team of AI scientists while continuing to contribute directly to research: running experiments, developing novel algorithms, and publishing at top-tier venues.

This role reports to the Senior Director of AI Research within Autodesk AI Lab.

Why This Role

Unique research surface area

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.

Research-first, with real impact

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.

What You Will Do

Research & Technical Leadership

Own post-training strategy 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

Evaluation & Model Quality

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

Team & Organizational Leadership

Manage, mentor, and grow a team of AI scientists
Set technical direction and research priorities across post-training and alignment initiatives
Foster a research culture grounded in scientific rigor, reproducibility, and fast iteration
Help recruit world-class talent across ML, RL, alignment, and foundation models
Partner closely with pre-training teams, infrastructure, product organizations, and other stakeholders
Translate research trade

AI Research Manager/Scientist, Post-training at Autodesk