Principal AI Research Scientist

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions and enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed. We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive at every stage of your career. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One.

Job Description

U.S. Bank is seeking a Principal AI Research Scientist to join the Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence (AI CoE), a high-impact organization responsible for advancing the bank's AI strategy from early-stage research through enterprise deployment.

This role is ideal for a highly technical and hands-on AI leader who thrives at the intersection of research, innovation, and execution. The successful candidate will continuously evaluate emerging advances in artificial intelligence, identify opportunities to create business value, rapidly prototype novel solutions, and lead their evolution into scalable enterprise capabilities.

Unlike traditional research positions, this role spans the entire R&D lifecycle. The ideal candidate combines deep scientific expertise with strong software engineering and solution delivery capabilities, enabling them to move seamlessly from research exploration and experimentation to deployment and adoption of production-grade AI solutions.

The candidate is expected to be an active contributor to the broader AI community, maintain awareness of cutting-edge academic and industry developments, and help shape the future direction of AI innovation within the bank.

Key Responsibilities

AI Research & Innovation

• Monitor, evaluate, and experiment with emerging AI technologies, research breakthroughs, and industry trends, with particular emphasis on generative AI, large language models (LLMs), multimodal AI, and agentic AI systems.

• Identify opportunities to apply advanced AI techniques to complex business problems across financial services.

• Conduct original AI research and exploratory investigations to assess the feasibility and value of novel approaches.

• Develop hypotheses, design experiments, evaluate results, and communicate findings to technical and executive stakeholders.

• Contribute to publications, patents, technical whitepapers, and thought leadership initiatives where appropriate.

Prototyping & Solution Development

• Rapidly transform research concepts into working prototypes and proof-of-concepts.

• Design, develop, and validate AI solutions across the full lifecycle, from data preparation and modeling through deployment and monitoring.

• Build experimental and production-ready solutions using modern AI/ML tools, frameworks, and cloud platforms.

• Apply best practices in model evaluation, benchmarking, explainability, security, and responsible AI.

Generative AI & Agentic Systems

• Lead the development of solutions leveraging foundation models, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), fine-tuning techniques, and agentic workflows.

• Design and evaluate AI agents, multi-agent systems, orchestration frameworks, tool-use architectures, memory systems, and human-in-the-loop workflows.

• Establish best practices for prompt engineering, model adaptation, evaluation, observability, and governance of LLM-based systems.

• Assess emerging model architectures and determine their applicability within a highly regulated environment.

Deployment & Technical Leadership

• Partner with software engineers, platform teams, product managers, and business stakeholders to transition successful prototypes into production environments.

• Provide technical leadership throughout deployment and operationalization activities.

• Drive architectural decisions for AI solutions while balancing innovation, scalability, security, compliance, and operational requirements.

• Mentor engineers and data scientists and provide guidance on advanced AI techniques and best practices.

• Take ownership of outcomes and ensure successful delivery of AI capabilities from concept through adoption.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree, or equivalent work experience

• Eight or more years of relevant experience

Preferred Skills/Experience

• Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline.

• 8+ years of experience in AI/ML research, development, and deployment.

• Strong programming skills in Python and modern AI/ML frameworks.

• Demonstrated experience designing, building, and deploying AI/ML solutions in production environments.

• Experience working across the full lifecycle of AI product development, from research and experimentation through deployment and operationalization.

• Deep expertise in machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, transformer architectures, and foundation models.

• Extensive experience with generative AI technologies, including LLMs, fine-tuning, RAG systems, model evaluation, and inference optimization.

• Experience building and evaluating agentic AI systems, multi-agent workflows, AI orchestration frameworks, and autonomous decision-making architectures.

• Strong hands-on experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face, Langchain, LangGraph, or equivalent AI ecosystems.

• Demonstrated record of innovation through publications, patents, open-source contributions, conference presentations, or significant AI solution delivery.

• Experience developing AI solutions within highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, insurance, or telecommunications.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to translate complex AI concepts into actionable business outcomes.

Location Expectations:

This role requires working from a U.S. Bank location three (3) or more days per week.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate a disability during any portion of the application or hiring process, please refer to our disability accommodations for applicants.

Benefits:

Our approach to benefits and total rewards considers our team members’ whole selves and what may be needed to thrive in and outside work. That's why our benefits are designed to help you and your family boost your health, protect your financial security and give you peace of mind. Our benefits include the following:

• Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)

• Basic term and optional term life insurance

• Short-term and long-term disability

• Pregnancy disability and parental leave

• 401(k) and employer-funded retirement plan

• Paid vacation (from two to five weeks depending on salary grade and tenure)

• Up to 11 paid holiday opportunities

• Adoption assistance

• Sick and Safe Leave accruals of one hour for every 30 worked, up to 80 hours per calendar year unless otherwise provided by law

Review our full benefits available by employment status here.

U.S. Bank is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, religion, color, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or veteran status, and other factors protected under applicable law.

E-Verify

U.S. Bank participates in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security E-Verify program in all facilities located in the United States and certain U.S. territories. The E-Verify program is an Internet-based employment eligibility verification system operated by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Learn more about the E-Verify program.

The salary range reflects figures based on the primary location, which is listed first. The actual range for the role may differ based on the location of the role. In addition to salary, U.S. Bank offers a comprehensive benefits package, including incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase 401(k) contribution and pension (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). Pay Range: $149,515.00 - $175,900.00

U.S. Bank will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment. U.S. Bank conducts background checks consistent with applicable local laws, including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance and the California Fair Chance Act as well as the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. U.S. Bank is subject to, and conducts background checks consistent with the requirements of Section 19 of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act (FDIA). In addition, certain positions may also be subject to the requirements of FINRA, NMLS registration, Reg Z, Reg G, OFAC, the NFA, the FCPA, the Bank Secrecy Act, the SAFE Act, and/or federal guidelines applicable to an agreement, such as those related to ethics, safety, or operational procedures.

Applicants must be able to comply with U.S. Bank policies and procedures including the Code of Ethics and Business Conduct and related workplace conduct and safety policies.

Posting may be closed earlier due to high volume of applicants.