- We are looking for an Associate Applied Scientist to join a dynamic and innovative AI platform team. If you are passionate about applying machine learning to knowledge graphs and reasoning systems at scale, this is an opportunity to build core components of Outreach's per-tenant knowledge graph while developing deep expertise under the guidance of senior scientists.
- Our team is building a per-tenant contextual knowledge graph that captures the full complexity of each customer's sales environment: accounts, deals, contacts, rep behaviors, competitive landscape, and the signals buried in calls, emails, and CRM activity. This graph powers contextual reasoning across the platform, driving next-best-action recommendations, deal risk signals, coaching suggestions, and competitive intelligence. In this pivotal role, you will design the underlying representations, extraction pipelines, and reasoning layers that make this possible, working closely with cross-functional engineering and product teams to deliver innovative, scalable, and reliable AI capabilities with direct impact on revenue outcomes.
- This role is ideal for someone with strong ML fundamentals who wants to build deep expertise in knowledge graphs and applied NLP in a fast-moving product environment.
Your Daily Adventures Will Include:
- Knowledge Graph Design & Construction: Design and implement entity resolution and ontology population within established graph schemas. Write and optimize queries for graph traversal and feature extraction. Own data quality for assigned domains.
- Information Extraction: Build pipelines that extract structured knowledge from unstructured conversational and document data (sales calls, emails, CRM notes), including coreference resolution, relation extraction, and event detection. Run experiments to compare approaches and improve accuracy metrics.
- Contextual Reasoning & Recommendation: Implement graph traversal logic and feature queries that feed downstream scoring signals. Build and maintain features for deal risk, next-best-action, or coaching recommendation surfaces.
- Representation Learning: Train and evaluate link prediction and node classification models using established graph embedding methods. Implement evaluation pipelines and track model performance over time.
- Domain Modeling: Translate sales concepts, such as deal stages, buyer engagement patterns, rep behaviors, and account health, into graph nodes and relationships under the guidance of senior scientists. Contribute to ontology design and documentation.
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Work with software engineers to deploy models and pipelines into production. Write clean, tested code. Monitor system health and respond to incidents. Participate in code review and design discussions.
Our Vision of You:
- PhD in a relevant field such as Computer Science, NLP, Machine Learning, or a related discipline with a focus on knowledge representation and reasoning, information extraction and relationship extraction, graph neural networks, recommendation systems, or conversation AI and dialogue systems. MS + 2 years of relevant experiecne will also be considered.
- Solid engineering fundamentals. You can write production-quality code, not just prototype notebooks. You can write clean, tested Python code. Experience with graph databases or query languages (e.g., Neo4j, SPARQL, Cypher).
- Demonstrated ability to build and evaluate ML models. You've trained models, measured performance using appropriate metrics, and iterated on results.
- A track record of building things: whether that's research prototypes that went beyond the paper, open-source contributions, or side projects that required real systems thinking. You understand the gap between a research prototype and a reliable production system, such as monitoring, data drift, latency, and operational excellence.
- Strong Ownership: Take end-to-end responsibility for research and model development initiatives, from problem formulation and data analysis through experimentation, production deployment, and ongoing performance monitoring, driving outcomes with minimal oversight.
- Good communication skills. You can explain technical concepts to engineers and product managers.
- Eager to learn. You are excited to develop deep expertise in knowledge graphs and applied NLP under the mentorship of senior scientists.
Nice to Have:
- Hands-on experience applying knowledge graphs or graph-based learning methods to real-world data in a production setting.
- Strong fundamentals in at least two of: knowledge graph construction, information extraction, graph neural networks, or recommender systems.
- Experience working with large-scale unstructured text data (conversational transcripts, email, or similar)
- Experience with probabilistic graphical models, conversational AI, or sales/revenue domain data
- Published research at top-tier venues
Why Join Us?
- Greenfield Architecture: Shape the design of a core AI system from the ground up, with the latitude to make foundational technical decisions that define the platform.
- Depth That Matters: This role genuinely requires PhD-level thinking; you will tackle problems in entity resolution, temporal reasoning, and graph learning that demand it.
- Applied Impact: Work with real production feedback loops and millions of sales interactions, not just benchmarks; see your models change how thousands of teams sell.
- High Leverage, Low Bureaucracy: Join a small, senior team where your contributions are visible, your ideas ship fast, and you have direct access to leadership.
- Career Growth: Opportunity to lead initiatives and mentor engineers.
Skills Required
- PhD in Computer Science, NLP, Machine Learning, or related field (MS + 2 years relevant experience considered)
- Production-quality Python programming; write clean, tested code
- Experience with graph databases or query languages (e.g., Neo4j, SPARQL, Cypher)
- Demonstrated ability to build and evaluate ML models and measure performance
- Experience building end-to-end systems or research prototypes that bridge to production
- Ownership of research and model development from problem formulation through deployment and monitoring
- Good communication skills to explain technical concepts to engineers and product managers
- Eagerness to learn and develop expertise in knowledge graphs and applied NLP
- Hands-on experience applying knowledge graphs or graph-based learning methods in production
- Strong fundamentals in at least two of: knowledge graph construction, information extraction, graph neural networks, recommender systems
- Experience working with large-scale unstructured text data (conversational transcripts, email)
- Experience with probabilistic graphical models, conversational AI, or sales/revenue domain data
- Published research at top-tier venues
Outreach Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Outreach and has not been reviewed or approved by Outreach.
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Parental & Family Support — Parental leave is described as unusually generous, including extended leave and distinctive transition support such as a paid night nurse option and food delivery. Family-oriented benefits are repeatedly positioned as a standout part of the overall package.
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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision coverage is described as comprehensive, with the employer covering a majority of premiums in many cases. Mental health support and an EAP for confidential counseling are also included as part of the health offering.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity (stock options/RSUs) is commonly included as part of total compensation and is framed as a meaningful component of rewards. For some roles, equity is viewed as a notable source of upside that complements cash compensation.
Outreach Insights
What We Do
Outreach is the number one sales engagement platform. Using advanced machine learning and AI to automate and prioritize customer touchpoints, Outreach dramatically increases sales reps' effectiveness and ability to drive smarter, more insightful engagement with their customers. We're on a mission to make every customer-facing rep wildly productive.
Why Work With Us
We balance explosive growth with unwavering values. We believe in agility, but we don't compromise on high standards or delivering the best quality. Everyone truly wants to do the right thing. At Outreach, you are not only permitted to own your business, but expected to. If you're excited by ownership, you'll fit right in. You will never be bored.
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