Machine Learning Scientist - Open Source Lead

LMArena is looking for a Machine Learning Scientist to lead our open-source research, including open data set and code releases, advancing how the world evaluates and understands AI models in the open. You’ll design, run, and share new methods and experiments that reveal what makes models useful, trustworthy, and capable, grounded in human preference signals and released openly for the full ecosystem and research community to build upon.

In this role, you’ll be responsible for taking our commitment to openness from principle to practice, curating high-impact datasets, developing new methodology and reproducible benchmarks, and releasing code that enables the research ecosystem to push AI evaluations forward. Your work will shape the public leaderboard, power community tools, and strengthen transparency in AI evaluation worldwide.

This role is deeply interdisciplinary, working with engineers, product teams, marketing, and the broader research community to advance how we compare models, analyze preference data, and understand factors like style, reasoning, and robustness. You’ll work closely with GTM teams as our spokesperson when it comes to outreach for our open research efforts: strengthening research partnerships, expanding research community participation, and championing programs that grow and support our research network.

If you’re excited by open-ended questions, rigorous evaluation, and scientific communication and outreach, you’ll find a meaningful home here. We’re looking for:

Hands-on experience training large-scale models, including reward models, preference models, and fine-tuning LLMs with methods like RLHF, DPO, and contrastive learning.

Strong foundation in ML and statistics, with a track record of designing novel training objectives, evaluation schemes, or statistical frameworks to improve model reliability and alignment.

Fluent in the full experimental stack, from dataset design and large-batch training to rigorous evaluation and ablation, with an eye for what scales to production.

Deeply collaborative mindset, working closely with engineers to productionize research insights and iterating with product teams to align research with user needs.

Comfortable being a visible representative of LMArena, engaging openly with the research community, and building a strong personal brand to help shape AI research culture.

Design and conduct experiments to evaluate AI model behavior across reasoning, style, robustness, and user preference dimensions

Develop new metrics, methodologies, and evaluation protocols that go beyond traditional benchmarks

Analyze large-scale human voting and interaction data to uncover insights into model performance and user preferences

Communicate results with the broader research community via academic papers, educational content, conference talks

Collaborate with engineers to implement and scale research findings into production systems

Prototype and test research ideas rapidly, balancing rigor with iteration speed

Partner with model providers to shape evaluation questions and support responsible model testing

Contribute to the scientific integrity and transparency of the LMArena leaderboard and tools

PhD or equivalent research experience in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Statistics, or a related field

Uses personal and professional platforms to amplify open research initiatives and invite collaboration.

Strong understanding of LLMs and modern deep learning architectures (e.g., Transformers, diffusion models, reinforcement learning with human feedback) Proficiency in Python and ML research libraries such as PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow

Demonstrated ability to design and analyze experiments with statistical rigor

Experience publishing research or working on open-source projects in ML, NLP, or AI evaluation

Comfortable working with real-world usage data and designing metrics beyond standard benchmarks

Ability to translate research questions into practical systems and collaborate across engineering and product teams

Passion for open science, reproducibility, and community-driven research