Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Enterprise SaaS search and knowledge products are increasingly being rebuilt around generative AI, and this role sits directly in that shift. Working on a “Knowledge AI” team implies ownership of language capabilities that become platform primitives—retrieval, ranking, and answer generation—rather than one-off features. The emphasis on serving models “at scale” and under real-world constraints also signals a production-first applied science environment typical of mature SaaS products with demanding enterprise users.
For a SaaS career, the durable value here is learning how to translate NLP research into measurable product outcomes: evaluation design, latency and reliability trade-offs, and iterative experimentation tied to user experience. Exposure to retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, and question answering builds transferable expertise across SaaS categories where discoverability and self-serve support matter. The collaboration with ML platform teams further develops the systems perspective needed to operationalize models across multiple product surfaces.
This role suits senior applied scientists who prefer end-to-end accountability—from modeling choices through deployment—and who are comfortable influencing technical direction. It also fits professionals motivated by mentoring and setting standards, where impact comes from raising scientific rigor and enabling others, not only individual contributions.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Shape the future of enterprise AI technology
Do you want to turn cutting-edge natural language processing into products impacting millions of users?
As a Senior II Applied Scientist on Coveo’s Knowledge AI team, you will help build the language technologies at the core of our generative artificial intelligence platform.
You’ll take on a technical leadership role, influencing our NLP vision while designing, evaluating, and deploying advanced solutions such as retrieval augmented generation pipelines, information retrieval, semantic search, question answering, and agentic systems, always with real-world constraints in mind.
As one of our Senior II Applied Scientists, you will:
Design, develop, and optimize modern language-based artificial intelligence solutions, from data and modeling choices to evaluation strategies and production constraints.
Apply and serve transformer-based language models at scale, delivering reliable, real-time experiences to enterprise users.
Collaborate closely with machine learning developers and the machine learning platform team to accelerate research and innovation cycles.
Act as a technical reference within the team, guiding architectural decisions and promoting best practices in applied science.
Mentor applied scientists, supporting their growth and helping raise the overall level of expertise within the group.
Contribute to research and development processes that foster efficiency, rigor, and a culture of applied science excellence.
Share our innovations externally through technical blog posts, presentations, or other thought leadership content.
Here is what will qualify you for the role:
A PhD, or a Master’s degree with equivalent research experience, in a relevant field such as machine learning, computer science, mathematics, or physics.
At least 8 years of industry experience applying modern natural language processing techniques, including deep learning and large language models, to real-world systems at scale.
Strong experience designing models and systems that balance performance, user experience, and production realities.
Ability to deliver production-grade code that is well-tested, maintainable, and evaluated through rigorous experimentation.
What will make you stand out:
Experience in a technical leadership capacity, including mentoring, hiring, roadmap definition, or scientific project planning.
Research or applied experience in areas closely related to Coveo’s business, such as information retrieval, neural search, semantic search, or question answering.
Exposure to more traditional lexical or linguistics-based natural language processing techniques.
International work experience and a demonstrated ability to collaborate across cultures and perspectives.
Do you think you can bring this role to life? Or add your own color?You don’t need to check every single box; passion goes a long way and we appreciate that skillsets are transferable.
Send us your application, we want to hear from you!
Join the Coveolife!
We encourage all qualified candidates to apply regardless of, for example, age, gender, disability, gaps in CV, national or ethnic background.
