# Senior Applied AI Researcher

**Company**: BlackRock
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: 20100000 - 32400000 HUF
**Category**: Data Science
**Industry**: Finance
**Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q219635

**Apply**: https://blackrock.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/BlackRock_Professional/job/BU3-Budapest-GTC-White-House-Vaci-ut-47-District-XIII-Budapest/Senior-Modelling-Data-Scientist--Vice-President_R263228?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_28720402-3dd

## Description

We are looking for a Senior Applied AI Researcher to join our data science team working on advanced AI-driven solutions.

This is primarily an individual contributor role, with responsibility for owning end-to-end ownership of complex modelling / AI problem areas and technical ownership of AI capabilities critical to the product.

The role focuses on the research, prototyping, evaluation, and improvement of AI solutions, with hands-on work across LLM-based systems, including agent-style workflows and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) where appropriate.

**Key Responsibilities**

- Own AI projects or functional modules from problem definition through prototype validation and production support.

- Partner with product managers and business stakeholders to translate real-world problems into clearly scoped data science and AI initiatives.

- Independently plan and execute research, experimentation, and iteration cycles in ambiguous problem spaces.

- Design AI solutions with a system-level perspective, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and long-term sustainability.

- Design and prototype LLM-powered solutions, including RAG-based systems and agent-like workflows.

- Contribute to defining system behavior, scope, and constraints, with attention to quality, robustness, and operational considerations.

- Stay current with emerging AI techniques and apply them pragmatically to solve business problems.

- Build and maintain evaluation frameworks to assess AI system performance.

- Develop quantitative and qualitative metrics, benchmarks, and testing approaches to validate prototypes and track improvements.

- Analyze existing solutions to identify gaps and drive continuous, data-driven performance enhancements.

- Work closely with data scientists, engineers, and product teams to ensure smooth transition from prototype to production.

- Clearly communicate methods, assumptions, results, and limitations to technical and non-technical audiences.

- Support engineering teams during implementation by clarifying evaluation criteria, edge cases, and expected system behavior.

- Serve as a technical authority and actively mentor junior data scientists, shaping best practices in experimentation, evaluation, and AI system design.

**Required Qualifications**

- 6+ years of experience in data science, applied machine learning, or a closely related role.

- Strong mathematical, statistical, and machine learning foundations.

- Proven ability to select, apply, and critically evaluate ML models and algorithms for real-world problems.

- Strong Python skills for analysis, modelling, experimentation, and prototyping.

- Strong SQL skills for data exploration, transformation, and analytical workflows.

- Excellent analytical thinking and problem-structuring abilities.

- Experience using Git for version control and collaborative development.

- Strong English communication skills, both written and verbal.

**Preferred Qualifications**

- Hands-on experience with LLMs, including prompt/system design and building real-world applications.

- Experience with RAG systems, including retrieval strategies, chunking, evaluation, and performance tuning.

- Experience designing or contributing to agent-style AI systems.

- ML modeling experience beyond exploratory analysis.

- Understanding of software engineering best practices.

- Experience working in Azure or similar cloud environments.

- Familiarity with Snowflake.

**What Success Looks Like in This Role**

- You independently deliver high-quality AI prototypes and evaluation frameworks.

- You proactively define scope, success metrics, and experimentation plans.

- Your evaluation approaches enable reliable comparison, regression prevention, and continuous improvement of AI solutions.

- Engineering teams can confidently productionize your work.

- Over time, you raise the technical maturity of AI development and evaluation practices within the team.

The salary range for Hungary is 20100000 - 32400000 HUF.

Additionally, employees are eligible for an annual discretionary bonus, and benefits including healthcare, leave benefits, and retirement benefits.

## Skills

### Required
- Python
- SQL
- Git
- machine learning
- statistics
- mathematics

### Nice to have
- LLMs
- RAG systems
- agent-style AI systems
- Azure
- Snowflake

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Source: [Apply at blackrock.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com](https://blackrock.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/BlackRock_Professional/job/BU3-Budapest-GTC-White-House-Vaci-ut-47-District-XIII-Budapest/Senior-Modelling-Data-Scientist--Vice-President_R263228?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)