Cerence AI · 3 weeks ago
Sr. Principal Software Scientist
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
$185K/yr - $280K/yrCerence AI is the global leader in AI for transportation, specializing in building AI and voice-powered companions for vehicles. The Senior Principal Software Scientist will design and train large-scale models, own architectural decisions, and ensure training stability while driving innovation in AI for mobility.
AutomotiveIndustrialIndustrial Automation
Responsibilities
Design and train large-scale transformer and hybrid foundation models
Own model architecture choices across text, multimodal, and emerging paradigms
Diagnose and resolve training instabilities at scale
Navigate scaling tradeoffs across data, compute, and architecture
Define the technical direction for next-generation models
Apply strong fundamentals in deep learning and representation learning
Design and modify transformer architectures, including:
Attention variants
RoPE, ALiBi
Grouped Query Attention (GQA)
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)
Build models from first principles, not just adapt pre-existing codebases
Own optimizer and scheduler choices, including:
AdamW
Lion
Adafactor
Learning-rate and warmup schedulers
Understand and debug:
Optimizer instability
Gradient pathologies
Divergence at large scale
Apply and validate scaling laws
Navigate Chinchilla-style compute vs data tradeoffs
Make informed decisions about model size, dataset size, and training duration
Design and experiment with loss functions including:
Next-token prediction
Contrastive objectives
RLHF, DPO, GRPO
Understand how loss design impacts convergence, generalization, and alignment
Design and execute large-scale training using:
FSDP
ZeRO-3
Tensor parallelism
Pipeline parallelism
Apply
Mixed precision (bf16, fp8)
Gradient checkpointing
Partner closely with ML systems teams while retaining architectural ownership
Explore and implement novel model designs, including:
MoE routing strategies
Multimodal fusion architectures
SSM / hybrid architectures
Design architectures with KV cache efficiency and inference implications in mind
Qualification
Required
Deep theoretical and practical understanding of modern deep learning
Hands-on experience training large models from scratch
Ability to reason about optimization, not just tune hyperparameters
Comfort operating in ambiguous, research-driven environments
Transformer internals and attention mechanisms
Optimisation algorithms and training dynamics
Scaling laws and compute/data tradeoffs
Distributed training strategies and mixed precision
Architecture innovation for large, real-world models
Benefits
Annual bonus opportunity
Insurance coverage (medical, dental, vision, life, and disability)
Paid time off
Paid holidays
Company contribution to the RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan)
Equity awards for certain positions and levels
Remote and/or hybrid work available depending on the position
Company
Cerence AI
Cerence AI (NASDAQ: CRNC) is a global industry leader in creating intuitive, seamless, AI-powered experiences across automotive and transportation.
Founded in 2019
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Cerence AI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
100%
Represents job field similar to this job
Engineering and Development
Trends of Total Sponsorships
*2020 (1)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$190MKey Investors
Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi)
2023-06-22Post Ipo Debt· $190M
2020-12-21Grant
2019-10-01IPO
Leadership Team
Brian Krzanich
Chief Executive Officer
Tony Rodriquez
Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
2026-07-03
2026-06-02
2026-05-07
Company data provided by crunchbase