Lead Applied Scientist (Search & QnA)

Company Overview

Docusign brings agreements to life. Over 1.5 million customers and more than a billion people in over 180 countries use Docusign solutions to accelerate the process of doing business and simplify people’s lives. With intelligent agreement management, Docusign unleashes business-critical data that is trapped inside of documents. Until now, these were disconnected from business systems of record, costing businesses time, money, and opportunity. Using Docusign’s Intelligent Agreement Management platform, companies can create, commit, and manage agreements with solutions created by the #1 company in e-signature and contract lifecycle management (CLM).

What you'll do

As a Lead Applied Scientist in the Docusign AI team, you are responsible for shaping the AI strategy and setting the standards of technical excellence in Applied Science and Machine Learning. You will be leading the efforts on building the core AI/ML capabilities and models powering our new Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform.

 

You will mentor the Applied Scientists on the team and use state of the art machine learning techniques for natural language processing to improve how agreements are searched, queried and managed. The ideal candidate should have experience with all aspects of designing, building, tuning, and evaluating machine learning solutions, deep learning architectures (e.g. transformer architectures, twin-tower networks) and LLMs. Collaborating closely with product and platform partners, you will play a leading role in delivering AI solutions for agreement understanding, information extraction, semantic search, question answering, among others.

 

You’ll be expected to use pretrained models, which can then be adapted to a new domain and fine-tuned for specific tasks. Experience with query processing and augmentation, document processing and indexing, search retrieval and ranking, RAG, LLM and Agentic approaches, evaluation metrics and telemetry/feedback will be valuable.

 

You will use your expertise in data modeling and machine learning to advance our AI features and deliver more personalized and automated customer experiences throughout the Docusign Agreement Platform. You will bring your technical chops and team building chops together to work alongside a world class team to successfully take on this unique responsibility. You will exemplify a flexible attitude combined with the ability to learn and share. You will embrace and enhance our culture and be a role model.

 

This position is an individual contributor role reporting to the Sr. Manager, Machine Learning.

 

Responsibility

• Build high scale models, AI strategy for search relevance, question answering / conversational systems, autocomplete, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and personalized recommendations
• Champion strong fundamentals (reliability, resiliency, data privacy, security, compliance) for these platform services assets
• Responsible for several V1 (new) initiatives to enhance and unlock new and innovative use cases for our customers
• Work closely with Product Management to translate user scenarios and product requirements into robust, customer-agnostic machine learning solutions, participate in design and planning discussions to make sure we can deliver high quality AI/ML features on time
• Understand, assist and improve the existing model training, evaluation and online inferencing process, define online metrics and design user feedback loop for our AI / ML features
• Deliver products that delight customers while managing the health of the code base through continuous refactoring and management of technical debt
• Provide coaching and leadership in applied science for best practices, modeling and evaluation techniques, responsible AI, model interpretability and machine teaching
• Lean in with technical leadership to deliver success against our goals

Job Designation

Hybrid: Employee divides their time between in-office and remote work. Access to an office location is required. (Frequency: Minimum 2 days per week; may vary by team but will be weekly in-office expectation)

 

Positions at Docusign are assigned a job designation of either In Office, Hybrid or Remote and are specific to the role/job. Preferred job designations are not guaranteed when changing positions within Docusign. Docusign reserves the right to change a position's job designation depending on business needs and as permitted by local law.

What you bring

Basic

• Minimum of 12 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 8 years of related experience with a Master's degree; or a PhD with 5 years experience; or equivalent experience
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Physics,