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Principal Applied Scientist

Job ID
507999
Posted since
27-May-2026
Organization
Data & Artificial Intelligence
Field of work
Research & Development
Company
Siemens Ltd., China
Experience level
Experienced Professional
Job type
Full-time
Work mode
Office/Site only
Employment type
Fixed Term
Location(s)
  • Beijing - Beijing Shi - China
  • Hangzhou - Zhejiang Sheng - China
  • Shanghai - Shanghai Shi - China
  • Shenzhen - Guangdong Sheng - China
The role
  • Siemens builds the systems the physical world runs on: factories, power grids, buildings, trains, hospitals. Industrial and physical AI is a major opportunity in applied AI, and one of the harder ones to get right. There is a generation of AI-powered products to build.
  • We are forming an applied science organization in China to build the science behind them. The work sits at the intersection of machine learning research, real world data, and production systems running in industrial environments.
  • As Principal Applied Scientist, you lead the science on a major capability area inside the pod. You take ambiguous problems through hypothesis, method selection, experimentation, and into models that run in production. You are hands on with the modeling, and you are accountable for the rigor and the outcome.
  • This is a senior individual contributor role. You will work in close partnership with the Senior Principal Applied Scientist, who sets the scientific direction for the pod, and with engineers and product managers who turn your work into product.

Key responsibilities
  • Own one or more scientific capability areas end to end, for example perception, language and agents, time series, control, planning, or evaluation.
  • Take problems from ambiguous product or system requirements through clear research questions, hypotheses, and success metrics.
  • Lead applied research projects: literature review, method selection, experimentation, ablation, error analysis, and productization.
  • Build and run the evaluation pipelines for the work you own: offline metrics, online experiments, robustness testing in industrial conditions.
  • Work with engineers to take models into production grade pipelines: data readiness, training infrastructure, inference, observability.
  • Make scientific tradeoffs in front of engineers and product managers, with evidence, and translate them into decisions the team can act on.
  • Identify and de-risk scaling challenges in your area: data quality, model drift, latency, throughput, cost, safety.
  • Raise the bar on experimentation rigor, reproducibility, and documentation across the team.
  • Apply responsible AI practices in your work: bias detection, model risk management, human in the loop controls.

Basic qualifications
  • 8+ years in applied machine learning, AI research, or data science, with models that shipped to production and made an impact.
  • Strong foundation in machine learning theory and practice across training, evaluation, and deployment.
  • Demonstrated experience taking research from a paper or prototype into a model that runs reliably in production.
  • Proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks and toolchains.
  • Strong partnership track record with engineering teams on data, training infrastructure, and inference.
  • Clear written and verbal communication with engineers, product managers, and senior leaders.

Preferred qualifications
  • Experience applying ML in industrial or physical domains: manufacturing, automation, robotics, energy, mobility, infrastructure, healthcare.
  • Deep expertise in one of: multimodal ML, generative AI, retrieval augmented generation, agentic workflows, time series, control, or planning.
  • Hands-on experience building evaluation pipelines, running online experiments, or instrumenting production monitoring for a model you owned.
  • Publications, patents, open source contributions, or significant internal technology transfers.
  • Experience mentoring more junior scientists and engineers.
  • Experience working with globally distributed research, product, or engineering organizations.