SAP
Senior AI Researcher – Relational Foundation Models
Palo Alto, CA, United States · Hybrid · Senior · Full-time · Posted Oct 7, 2026
- Education
- PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a closely related field — or equivalent demonstrated research experience.
About the job
Conduct research and develop scalable Relational Foundation Models that learn and make predictions from multi-table enterprise data, translating validated methods into production-ready prototypes.
What you'll do
- Design model architectures, pretraining strategies, learning objectives, and inference methods for relational and structured data; run distributed GPU experiments and develop evaluation benchmarks.
- Contribute datasets, synthetic data generators, and evaluation frameworks, then translate research findings into scalable prototypes for engineering and product teams.
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship, and publish research at top-tier venues.
What they ask for
- PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a closely related field — or equivalent demonstrated research experience.
- Strong publication record at leading venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, AAAI, or AISTATS.
- Deep expertise in foundation-model techniques, including Transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, large-scale pretraining, in-context learning, and transfer learning.
- Hands-on experience in tabular machine learning, graph neural networks, relational learning, or structured prediction; excellent Python and PyTorch skills.
Nice to have
- Knowledge of relational database systems, SQL, or data-warehouse architectures.
- Experience with distributed training and large-scale GPU experimentation, benchmark development, or open-source machine learning libraries.
Tools
Python, PyTorch, Transformer architectures, GPU
AI focus
Research and develop relational foundation models for structured, multi-table enterprise data, including model architectures, pretraining, inference, datasets, and evaluation.
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