Senior Applied Scientist

At Guild, we believe talent is everywhere and that opportunity should be too. We continue to have our home and headquarters in Denver, but we have embraced a distributed model of working to reach the best talent in the United States. While some roles may require proximity to our Denver office, roles based outside of our Denver office can sit in any of the following 32 states: AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, KS, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, NC, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA, WA, WI and Washington D.C. Please only apply if you are able to live and work full-time in one of the states listed above. State locations and specifics are subject to change as our hiring requirements shift. 

If you are an Internal Candidate, please apply via our Internal Job Board. 

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To thrive as a company and meet our impact goals, we must cultivate a culture of high-performance. We know managers are often the single-largest driver of employee satisfaction and growth, and our talent is our biggest asset. Because of that, we’ve identified consistent expectations for all of Guild’s people managers — helping you know what to expect from your experience here.

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Guild is hiring a Senior Applied Scientist. 

The Opportunity

Join Guild at a pivotal moment as we build the AI/ML foundation that will transform how working adults navigate their education and career journeys. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you'll move beyond theoretical models to deliver production AI systems that directly improve member experiences—from augmenting our program and career data to developing agentic solutions and contributing to our Apollo platform's reinforcement learning capabilities. This is a high-impact role where your work ships to production and drives measurable outcomes for the millions of members we serve.

Here are the outcomes you will be expected to achieve:

• Deliver production AI/ML models that augment Guild's program and career data, empowering downstream product and analytics capabilities
• Launch production agentic data solutions through Databricks that improve information retrieval and synthesis while reducing operational costs
• Contribute to Guild's Apollo platform by developing AI/ML components including our reinforcement learning process and AI memory layer

Here's what you will do in this role to achieve these outcomes:

• Design, develop, and deploy production-ready AI/ML models that integrate into the product experience and drive measurable improvements in member outcomes and business performance
• Build robust evaluation frameworks including offline metrics, A/B testing, and monitoring strategies to assess model performance and business impact
• Own the end-to-end model lifecycle: deployment, monitoring, drift detection, retraining, and incident response using Guild's MLOps best practices
• Manipulate and analyze large, complex datasets using Python, SQL, Databricks, MLFlow, dbt, and Snowflake
• Partner with business stakeholders to translate strategic challenges into concrete, lasting AI/ML solutions
• Collaborate with engineering, innovation architects, and technical experts to operationalize models and stay current on emerging AI capabilities
• Influence the technical roadmap and architecture of Guild's AI platform by making principled tradeoffs across model complexity, scalability, latency, and cost
• Translate cutting-edge research (reinforcement learning, foundation models) into pragmatic, scalable solutions while exercising judgment about when ML is the right tool

You are probably a strong candidate for this role if you've accomplished:

• Shipped AI/ML models to production that drove measurable business or product outcomes (not just research or POCs)
• Built and maintained evaluation frameworks that included both offline experimentation and live A/B testing
• Developed data pipelines or ML infrastructure that scaled to support large datasets and multiple downstream consumers
• Translated ambiguous business problems into well-scoped ML solutions—and knew when not to use ML
• Worked cross-functionally with engineering, product, and business teams to operationalize technical solutions

Here are the skills/competencies you have that will be needed to achieve the expected outcomes:

• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for data manipulation and model development
• Hands-on experience with modern ML/data platforms (Databricks, MLFlow, Snowflake, dbt or similar)
• Deep understandin