Lead Data Scientist, AI Labs

NPR
Washington, New York
Workplace: HybridFull timeUSD 164,000 - 201,000 annuallyFunction: Data Science & Machine LearningExperience: 8+ yearsEducation: phdSkills: ["Technical leadership","Cross-disciplinary collaboration","Ethical decision-making","Accuracy and neutrality focus","Algorithmic bias mitigation"]

Serve as the technical and ethical anchor for AI Labs, leading data science work that powers a content metadata overhaul for audience-focused personalization. Fine-tune and evaluate LLMs, build automated ML pipelines to generate semantic metadata from audio/transcripts/text, and design recommendation frameworks using enriched metadata. Partner across product, design, engineering, and data platforms to deliver secure, scalable, API-driven tools with rigorous evaluation, bias mitigation, and privacy guardrails.

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FursaFursa
NPR
NPR
1 day ago

Lead Data Scientist, AI Labs

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Last checked: 9 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Serve as the technical and ethical anchor for AI Labs, leading data science work that powers a content metadata overhaul for audience-focused personalization. Fine-tune and evaluate LLMs, build automated ML pipelines to generate semantic metadata from audio/transcripts/text, and design recommendation frameworks using enriched metadata. Partner across product, design, engineering, and data platforms to deliver secure, scalable, API-driven tools with rigorous evaluation, bias mitigation, and privacy guardrails.
Location: Washington, New York
Workplace: Hybrid
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Data Science & Machine Learning
Seniority: Mid level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Select, fine-tune, and optimize open-source and proprietary LLMs tailored to NPR’s content voice.
  • •Design and architect automated machine learning pipelines that convert unstructured audio, transcripts, and text into semantic metadata.
  • •Collaborate with product, design, and engineering teams to translate user needs into production-ready data science workflows.
  • •Architect recommendation frameworks that use enriched metadata to deliver style-based audience personalization while preserving editorial curation.
  • •Establish evaluation, testing, and benchmarking frameworks to ensure outputs meet standards for factual accuracy and neutrality, including auditing and mitigating algorithmic bias.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 164,000 - 201,000 annually
Perks:Health InsurancePaid LeaveDentalVisionLife InsuranceRetirement SavingsLong-term Disability

Key Requirements

  • •8+ years of professional experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, or NLP shipping production-grade systems.
  • •Proven experience applying, fine-tuning, and evaluating large language models (LLMs) and foundational architectures.
  • •Experience with automatic speech recognition (ASR), diarization, and audio preprocessing pipelines.
  • •Demonstrated ability designing and maintaining large-scale data architectures, vector databases, and semantic search pipelines.
  • •Hands-on experience building and optimizing production-grade recommendation engines or personalization systems at scale.
Experience:8+ yearsMediaPublic serviceMultimediaNLP
Education:PhD / Doctorate in Computer Science, Data Science or Machine Learning
Skills:Technical leadershipCross-disciplinary collaborationEthical decision-makingAccuracy and neutrality focusAlgorithmic bias mitigation
Languages:English
Tech Stack:PythonAzureAWSGCPBigQuerySnowflakeLLMsNatural Language Processing (NLP)Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)DiarizationVector databasesSemantic searchRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)Recommendation enginesPersonalization systemsCI/CDAPI integrationAPI-driven toolingCloud data warehouseTwo-stage retrieval architectures

Company Brief

NPR
NPR (National Public Radio) is a nonprofit media organization producing and distributing news, cultural programming, and podcasts to a network of public radio stations across the United States.
Industry: News, Journalism & Broadcasting
Company Size: Enterprise (1,001+ employees)
Growth: Nonprofit & NGO
Funding: Grant Funded
Headquarters: Washington, D.C., United States
Founded: 1970
WebsiteLinkedIn