Lead Applied Scientist (Search & QnA)

Docusign brings agreements to life. Over 1.5 million customers and more than a billion people in over 180 countries use Docusign solutions to accelerate the process of doing business and simplify people's lives. With intelligent agreement management, Docusign unleashes business-critical data that is trapped inside of documents. Until now, these were disconnected from business systems of record, costing businesses time, money, and opportunity. Using Docusign's Intelligent Agreement Management platform, companies can create, commit, and manage agreements with solutions created by the #1 company in e-signature and contract lifecycle management (CLM).

As a Lead Applied Scientist in the Docusign AI team, you are responsible for shaping the AI strategy and setting the standards of technical excellence in Applied Science and Machine Learning. You will be leading the efforts on building the core AI/ML capabilities and models powering our new Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform.

You will mentor the Applied Scientists on the team and use state of the art machine learning techniques for natural language processing to improve how agreements are searched, queried and managed. The ideal candidate should have experience with all aspects of designing, building, tuning, and evaluating machine learning solutions, deep learning architectures (e.g. transformer architectures, twin-tower networks) and LLMs. Collaborating closely with product and platform partners, you will play a leading role in delivering AI solutions for agreement understanding, information extraction, semantic search, question answering, among others.

You'll be expected to use pretrained models, which can then be adapted to a new domain and fine-tuned for specific tasks. Experience with query processing and augmentation, document processing and indexing, search retrieval and ranking, RAG, LLM and Agentic approaches, evaluation metrics and telemetry/feedback will be valuable.

You will use your expertise in data modeling and machine learning to advance our AI features and deliver more personalized and automated customer experiences throughout the Docusign Agreement Platform. You will bring your technical chops and team building chops together to work alongside a world class team to successfully take on this unique responsibility. You will exemplify a flexible attitude combined with the ability to learn and share. You will embrace and enhance our culture and be a role model.

This position is an individual contributor role reporting to the Sr. Manager, Machine Learning.

Responsibility

• Build high scale models, AI strategy for search relevance, question answering / conversational systems, autocomplete, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and personalized recommendations
• Champion strong fundamentals (reliability, resiliency, data privacy, security, compliance) for these platform services assets
• Responsible for several V1 (new) initiatives to enhance and unlock new and innovative use cases for our customers
• Work closely with Product Management to translate user scenarios and product requirements into robust, customer-agnostic machine learning solutions, participate in design and planning discussions to make sure we can deliver high quality AI/ML features on time
• Understand, assist and improve the existing model training, evaluation and online inferencing process, define online metrics and design user feedback loop for our AI / ML features
• Deliver products that delight customers while managing the health of the code base through continuous refactoring and management of technical debt
• Provide coaching and leadership in applied science for best practices, modeling and evaluation techniques, responsible AI, model interpretability and machine teaching
• Lean in with technical leadership to deliver success against our goals

Hybrid: Employee divides their time between in-office and remote work. Access to an office location is required. (Frequency: Minimum 2 days per week; may vary by team but will be weekly in-office expectation)

Positions at Docusign are assigned a job designation of either In Office, Hybrid or Remote and are specific to the role/job. Preferred job designations are not guaranteed when changing positions within Docusign. Docusign reserves the right to change a position's job designation depending on business needs and as permitted by local law.

Basic

• Minimum of 12 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 8 years of related experience with a Master's degree; or a PhD with 5 years experience; or equivalent experience
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Physics, statistics, applied mathematics or an equal computational field
• Experience programming in Python, PyTorch or TensorFlow, spaCy, scikit-learn, or equivalent machine learning framework
• Experience in designing, developing, deploying and monitoring machine learning and deep learning solutions
• Experience leading ML projects and small teams of Applied Scientists / ML Engineers
• 5+ years hands on experience search retrieval, ranking, query processing and recommendations using deep learning and NLP
• Experience working with the latest NLP models like BERT, SentenceBert and LLMs like GPT, Gemini, Llama families of models, etc.
  
  

Preferred

• 8+ years of experience in designing, developing, deploying and monitoring machine learning and deep learning solutions focused on search and retrieval
• Experience building a sophisticated AI-driven search, Question Answering Conversational Systems stack from the ground up
• Experience with RAG and LLM agentic approaches
• Experience in multilingual LLM pretraining or fine-tuning
• Strong desire to stay ahead of industry trends technologies with a commitment to continuous learning
• Passion for continuous improvement

Pay for this position is based on a number of factors including geographic location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Based on applicable legislation, the below details pay ranges in the following locations:

California: $195,500.00 - $315,775.00 base salary

Washington, New Jersey and New York (including NYC metro area): $186,200.00 - $276,125.00 base salary

This role is also eligible for the following:

• Bonus: Sales personnel are eligible for variable incentive pay dependent on their achievement of pre-established sales goals. Non-Sales roles are eligible for a company bonus plan, which is calculated as a percentage of eligible wages and dependent on company performance.
• Stock: This role is eligible to receive Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

Global benefits provide options for the following:

• Paid Time Off: earned time off, as well as paid company holidays based on region
• Paid Parental Leave: take up to six months off with your child after birth, adoption or foster care placement
• Full Health Benefits Plans: options for 100% employer paid and minimum employee contribution health plans from day one of employment
• Retirement Plans: select retirement and pension programs with potential for employer contributions
• Learning and Development: options for coaching, online courses and education reimbursements
• Compassionate Care Leave: paid time off following the loss of a loved one and other life-changing events

Working here

Docusign is committed to building trust and making the world more agreeable for our employees, customers and the communities in which we live and work. You can count on us to listen, be honest, and try our best to do what's right, every day. At Docusign, everything is equal.

We each have a responsibility to ensure every team member has an equal opportunity to succeed, to be heard, to exchange ideas openly, to build lasting relationships, and to do the work of their life. Best of all, you will be able to feel deep pride in the work you do, because your contribution helps us make the world better than we found it. And for that, you'll be loved by us, our customers, and the world in which we live.

Accommodation

Docusign is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. If you need such an accommodation, or a religious accommodation, during the application process, please contact us at accommodations@docusign.com.

If you experience any issues, concerns, or technical difficulties during the application process please get in touch with our Talent organization at taops@docusign.com for assistance.

Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice

This position is not eligible for employment in the following states: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.

It's important to us that we build a talented team that is as diverse as our customers and where all employees feel a deep sense of belonging and thrive. We encourage great talent who bring a range of perspectives to apply for our open positions. Docusign is an Equal Opportunity Employer and makes hiring decisions based on experience, skill, aptitude and a can-do approach. We will not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, color, age, sex, religion, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information, physical or mental disability, registered domestic partner status, caregiver status, marital status, veteran or military status, or any other legally protected category.

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