Research Scientist - AI Incubation

• San Jose, California, United States
• Seattle, Washington, United States
• Full time

What you can expect

Zoom's AI Incubation team is seeking a Research Scientist to contribute to the next wave of LLM post-training, reinforcement learning, and federated AI innovation. You will join a world-class group of PhDs and applied scientists focused on pushing the boundaries of model alignment, reasoning, and agentic intelligence.

As a Research Scientist, you will advance Zoom's applied AI research, working with cutting-edge LLM post-training, RLHF/DPO/RLAIF, federated AI, and multimodal intelligence to deliver breakthroughs that redefine human-AI collaboration. You will participate in incubation efforts that transform bold research ideas into scalable, production-ready systems powering the next generation of Zoom AI Companion.

About the Team

The AI Incubation team is a high-impact applied research group that has built one of the best-performing federated AI systems in the industry. The team operates at the frontier of LLM post-training, reinforcement learning for agentic AI, multimodal understanding, federated AI, and AI evaluation.

Zoom's federated AI architecture—spanning Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google models—enables privacy-preserving, edge-to-cloud learning that adapts to user context while maintaining enterprise-grade governance. The Incubation team plays a central role in advancing this federated AI leadership, developing new methods for distributed model optimization, personalized prefix learning, and secure collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Conducting frontier research in LLM post-training, reinforcement learning, and federated AI to achieve state-of-the-art reasoning, personalization, and reliability.
• Developing and implementing evaluation and benchmarking frameworks for model performance, safety, and user experience across distributed environments.
• Contributing to model architectures, fine-tuning strategies, and rei...