AI Research Scientist- Associate Director

Known for being a great place to work and build a career, KPMG provides audit, tax and advisory services for organizations in today's most important industries. Our growth is driven by delivering real results for our clients. It's also enabled by our culture, which encourages individual development, embraces an inclusive environment, rewards innovative excellence and supports our communities. With qualities like those, it's no wonder we're consistently ranked among the best companies to work for by Fortune Magazine, Consulting Magazine, Seramount, Fair360 and others. If you're as passionate about your future as we are, join our team.

KPMG is currently seeking an AI Research Scientist to join our Audit Technology Alliance organization.

Responsibilities:

• Lead applied research initiatives related to AI models, advanced AI agent patterns, optimizing knowledge retrieval, among other areas, to solve complex audit challenges. 
• Collaborate closely with AI engineers and product managers to translate cutting-edge research in areas like context engineering and RAG into scalable, production-ready components 
• Design and champion a rigorous experimentation framework to measure, validate, and ensure the quality and reliability of AI-driven outcomes 
• Drive the team's research agenda by identifying emerging trends in generative AI, proposing innovative solutions, and mentoring junior scientists and engineers to foster a culture of continuous learning and excellence
• Design and implement processes to perform for AI model training; from infrastructure, to data labelling, evaluations, among other areas; work to ensure models can be deployed and managed in production 
• Architect and prototype novel research and new solutions; share findings with colleagues across KPMG globally to advance wider AI initiatives

Qualifications:

• Minimum eight years of recent experience in applied AI/ML research, with a focus on natural language processing, information retrieval, and large-scale language models
• Bachelor's degree from an accredited college/university in Computer Science, AI, Statistics, or a related quantitative field is required; advanced degree (Ph.D. or Master's) from an accredited college or university
• Deep theoretical knowledge and practical expertise in key research areas such as knowledge retrieval (RAG), AI agent architecture, and techniques for fine-tuning and evaluating language models
• Proven experience designing and implementing the end-to-end lifecycle for AI models, including data processing, labeling, training, and production deployment (MLOps)
• Extensive hands-on experience prototyping and experimenting with modern AI frameworks like LangChain/LangGraph or Semantic Kernel. 
• Exceptional ability to translate ambiguous business challenges into defined research problems and articulate complex findings and their strategic implications to both technical and executive audiences