[Hiring] Senior Applied Scientist @Guild

Role Description

Join Guild at a pivotal moment as we build the AI/ML foundation that will transform how working adults navigate their education and career journeys. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you'll move beyond theoretical models to deliver production AI systems that directly improve member experiences—from augmenting our program and career data to developing agentic solutions and contributing to our Apollo platform's reinforcement learning capabilities. This is a high-impact role where your work ships to production and drives measurable outcomes for the millions of members we serve.

• Deliver production AI/ML models that augment Guild's program and career data, empowering downstream product and analytics capabilities.
• Launch production agentic data solutions through Databricks that improve information retrieval and synthesis while reducing operational costs.
• Contribute to Guild's Apollo platform by developing AI/ML components including our reinforcement learning process and AI memory layer.

Here's what you will do in this role to achieve these outcomes:

• Design, develop, and deploy production-ready AI/ML models that integrate into the product experience and drive measurable improvements in member outcomes and business performance.
• Build robust evaluation frameworks including offline metrics, A/B testing, and monitoring strategies to assess model performance and business impact.
• Own the end-to-end model lifecycle: deployment, monitoring, drift detection, retraining, and incident response using Guild's MLOps best practices.
• Manipulate and analyze large, complex datasets using Python, SQL, Databricks, MLFlow, dbt, and Snowflake.
• Partner with business stakeholders to translate strategic challenges into concrete, lasting AI/ML solutions.
• Collaborate with engineering, innovation architects, and technical experts to operationalize models and stay current on emerging AI capabilities.
• Influence the technical roadmap and architecture of Guild's AI platform by making principled tradeoffs across model complexity, scalability, latency, and cost.
• Translate cutting-edge research (reinforcement learning, foundation models) into pragmatic, scalable solutions while exercising judgment about when ML is the right tool.

Qualifications

• Shipped AI/ML models to production that drove measurable business or product outcomes (not just research or POCs).
• Built and maintained evaluation frameworks that included both offline experimentation and live A/B testing.
• Developed data pipelines or ML infrastructure that scaled to support large datasets and multiple downstream consumers.
• Translated ambiguous business problems into well-scoped ML solutions—and knew when not to use ML.
• Worked cross-functionally with engineering, product, and business teams to operationalize technical solutions.

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for data manipulation and model development.
• Hands-on experience with modern ML/data platforms (Databricks, MLFlow, Snowflake, dbt or similar).
• Deep understanding of the full ML lifecycle: from experimentation through deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning, foundation models, or agentic AI architectures.
• Ability to design rigorous experiments and interpret results to inform product decisions.
• Strong communication skills to partner effectively with non-technical stakeholders.
• Sound judgment in balancing technical complexity with practical business constraints.

Benefits

• Access to low-cost, high-quality health care options through Collective Health and Kaiser (due to coverage limitations, Kaiser is currently only available in CA & CO).
• Access to a 401k to help save for the future.
• Vacation policy to rest and recharge.
• 8 days of fully-paid sick leave, to take the time to heal and or recover.
• Family-friendly benefits, including 12 weeks of parental leave for non-birthing parents and 18-20 weeks for birthing parents; 2-week ramp-up period for when employees return from a leave of 6 weeks or more; as well as employer-paid short-term and long-term disability, employer-sponsored life insurance, fertility and caregiving benefits.
• Well-rounded wellness benefits including free and low cost mental health resources and financial wellbeing support services.
• Education benefits and tuition assistance to help your future development and growth.