NLP Research Scientist
Advances language understanding, retrieval, and multilingual modeling, from research prototype to a measurable product gain.
ER&D Talent · Machine Learning & AI Practice
Talent for the Machine Learning & AI Era
AI programs need people who can move between research and production: training a model, evaluating it honestly, and shipping it at scale. Propellence finds the engineers and scientists who sit across that line, the ones a keyword search on “ML engineer” never surfaces.
10+ yrsER&D domain focus
5Regions: India, Germany, USA, Japan, APAC
Research + AppliedOne search, both profiles
AI hiring is a convergence problem: six disciplines, one platform. We search across all of them, not just one.
Roles We Fill
Cross-domain ML & AI roles, precisely defined
Generalist recruiters search by job title. We search by what the model, the data, and the product actually need, which is often a hybrid profile that no standard job description captures.
Computer Vision Engineer
Builds detection, segmentation, and multimodal vision systems that hold up on real-world, messy, edge-deployed data.
Generative AI / LLM Engineer
Designs RAG, agents, fine-tuning, and evaluation pipelines that turn a foundation model into a dependable product feature.
Foundation Model Research Scientist
Leads pretraining, data curation, scaling experiments, and alignment for large language and multimodal models.
ML Platform & Inference Lead
Owns training infrastructure, model serving, latency and cost optimization, and the monitoring that keeps models healthy in production.
Head of AI / Applied Science
Sets the AI roadmap and owns build-vs-buy decisions across models, data, talent, and governance.
Why Propellence
Built for a search problem that crosses domains
Most AI searches stall because the recruiting partner sources from one lane. The right candidate often sits between research and engineering, or between two modalities.
Bridge Talent, Not Bucketed Talent
We identify people who connect research depth with production discipline: scientists who ship and engineers who can read a paper and reproduce it.
One Search, Six Domains
NLP, computer vision, generative AI, foundation models, MLOps, and responsible AI, evaluated by consultants with real technical grounding in each.
Confidential, Passive Search
The people building frontier models are not browsing job boards. Our search is direct, discreet, and relationship-driven.
Global Reach, Where AI Talent Concentrates
Active coverage across India, Germany, the USA, Japan, and APAC, the hubs where product companies, research labs, and GCCs are scaling AI capability.
FAQ
ML & AI talent acquisition, explained
Straight answers to what clients ask before starting a search.
What does ML & AI talent acquisition cover?
It covers hiring for NLP, computer vision, generative AI, and foundation model development, plus the MLOps, inference, and responsible-AI roles that put models into production and keep them there.
Why is generative AI and foundation model hiring so hard?
The scarcest candidates combine research depth with production engineering. Few people have trained models at scale and also shipped them reliably, and most of them are already employed and not looking.
Do you hire for research roles or applied roles?
Both. We search from research scientists and pretraining specialists to applied ML engineers, MLOps leads, and heads of AI, for product companies, ER&D teams, and GCCs building AI capability from India, Germany, the USA, Japan, and APAC.
How do you assess technical depth in a fast-moving field?
Our consultants screen against the specifics of the role: modality, model scale, data and evaluation experience, and production track record, so you meet candidates whose experience matches the problem, not just the buzzwords.
Can you support a full AI team build-out, not just single hires?
Yes. From one critical research lead to coordinated multi-hire team builds across the six ML and AI domains, with the same rigor we bring to GCC build-outs.
Scaling an ML & AI team?
Tell us which capabilities are missing. We will bring you candidates who bridge them, not just fill a title.
Talk to Us