Principal Data Scientist
About the Position
We are hiring a Principal Data Scientist for the Data Science group, reporting directly to the VP Engineering. This is a senior individual-contributor leadership role: you own the technical direction and architecture of what the group ships - real-time inference at scale, automated red-teaming of GenAI systems, and the Databricks/Spark data platform underneath - and you lead the hardest projects end to end, hands on in the code.
What you'll own
A large Python, Rust, and PySpark monorepo, dozens of production services and shared libraries, across three connected domains:
Content-moderation inference at scale
Real-time, multi-tenant detection across text, image, video, and audio - hate speech, CSAM, nudity, child grooming, extremism, PII, prompt injection, age estimation, and more - served through our in-house ActiveServe framework over NVIDIA Triton and a Rust detection service, on latency-sensitive, SLA-bound, customer-facing traffic with per-customer custom models.
GenAI safety and red-teaming
Automated red-teaming that attacks customers' LLM applications with a research-driven attack taxonomy and measures attack-success rate, alongside the defensive side - LLM-as-judge escalation to cut false positives, and the tooling that authors and refines moderation policies - built on a multi-provider LLM foundation (Bedrock, Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, xAI Grok).
Data platform and MLOps
An end-to-end lakehouse and MLOps stack on Databricks - bronze/silver/gold ingestion, PySpark pipelines, and model training, versioning, and promotion through MLflow / Unity Catalog into Triton serving - with the performance-critical hot paths engineered in Rust (PyO3/maturin) for sub-millisecond, high-QPS matching and detection.
What you'll do
- Own the GenAI safety roadmap - decide what we build with LLMs and what we build around them: guardrails and LLM-as-judge adjudication, prompt-injection and jailbreak detection, policy authoring, and the automated red-teaming that measures attack-success rate against customers' applications. Choose which model families and providers we use, fine-tune, or retire, and what each has to prove before it reaches customer traffic.
- Own how we evaluate GenAI systems - benchmark and dataset design over real production traffic, LLM-jury labeling protocols, multilingual, multi-turn, and multimodal coverage, calibration and threshold selection, and the error analysis that turns a metric into a fix. Run the evaluations that separate a real shift in what these models can do from a launch post, and keep quality honest in production as traffic, prompts, and attacks drift.
- Lead the hardest GenAI work end to end, and grow the craft - take the ambiguous, high-stakes projects from framing through prototype, offline evaluation, shadow traffic, and rollout; mentor data scientists and ML engineers through design, experiment, and model review; and translate model behavior into what Product and customers care about: accuracy, latency, cost, and enterprise readiness.
Requirements
What we're looking for
- ML technical leadership - a proven tech lead, senior data scientist, or ML engineer who has taken multi-person, multi-quarter ML initiatives from framing to production without formal authority, with strong Python and the written communication to make the case in a design or an evaluation.
- Deep understanding of LLM technology - how these models are trained, adapted, and served, what prompting, fine-tuning, RAG, and agentic patterns each buy you, where they fail, and how to measure quality, latency, and cost.
- AI-augmented engineering - deep, daily fluency with an AI coding assistant (Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex), with the judgment to raise the whole team's leverage and set how these tools are used well.
About Alice
THE CHALLENGES ALONG THE WAY
1. Being Both Strategist and Executioner
One of the hardest parts of this role is that you’re both the visionary and the builder; the one drawing the map and paving the road.
That means switching between high-level strategy and hands-on experimentation daily, and doing it while bringing others along with you. There’s no playbook for this kind of work. You’re paving an unpaved road, one small experiment at a time.
2. Balancing Security and Innovation
ActiveFence is the leading provider of security and safety solutions for online experiences, safeguarding more than 3 billion users, top foundation models, and the world’s largest enterprises and tech platforms every day.
As a trusted ally to major technology firms and Fortune 500 brands that build user-generated and GenAI products, ActiveFence empowers security, AI, and policy teams with low-latency Real-Time Guardrails and a continuous Red Teaming program that pressure-tests systems with adversarial prompts and emerging threat techniques. Powered by deep threat intelligence, unmatched harmful-content detection, and coverage of 117+ languages, ActiveFence enables organizations to deliver engaging and trustworthy experiences at global scale while operating safely and responsibly across all threat landscapes.