Drimva

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.

Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative

First seen Oct 28, 2026 · Last verified Nov 6, 2026 (UTC)