AI Research Manager - Machine Learning

About Nu

Nu serves more than 140 million customers, guided by a mission to fight complexity and empower people. The company has been leading an industry transformation through innovative products and human-centered services.

 

Proprietary technology and data at scale power Nu’s digital platform, built to promote financial access, advancement, and transparency. Its business model thrives on customer love and lower costs, feeding a flywheel of growth and profitability.

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About the role

As AI Research Manager, you will own the operating health and execution of Nubank's ML research agenda. This is a dedicated people-management role for a small, high-talent-density team of world-class researchers, partnering closely with senior technical leads who drive the scientific direction.
The team works on a portfolio of research bets on a one-to-four-quarter horizon. This work compounds into the production capabilities Nubank will depend on. Current and upcoming bets include:

• Next-generation nuFormer architectures: proprietary transformers that learn from raw transaction sequences and power key production credit decisions

• Multitask and multi-target modeling: single models serving many high-impact prediction tasks at once

• Training and inference efficiency: distillation, quantization, sparsity, and parallelism to run state-of-the-art models economically at our scale

• Causal modeling and policy optimization: moving beyond prediction to the decisions and policies those predictions should drive

• World models: open-ended models that reason about a customer's full financial life

• Recommendation systems: extending the backbone to app events, engagement, and personalization signals

• Embeddings and representation learning: semantic IDs, contrastive learning, and reusable representations used across the bank

• Real-time and continual learning: low-latency inference and models that adapt over time

Your job is to make exceptional science happen: build the conditions, focus, and operating rhythm that researchers do great work.
Location: Palo Alto, US

You'll be responsible for

People & Team Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and advocate for a team of world-class ML researchers, fostering an environment of psychological safety, high ambition, and rigorous scientific inquiry.

• Own the operating health of the team, including performance, career growth, hiring, and compensation cycles for elite individual contributors who often operate at staff-and-above technical depth.

• Attract and retain top-tier research talent in a competitive market, and build a reputation for the team as a place the best researchers want to be.

Research Operations & Execution

• Own the operating cadence of a portfolio of two-to-three concurrent, quarter-scale research bets, from problem framing and OKRs through progress tracking and clear go/no-go decisions.

• Allocate scarce, high-value resources, most notably GPU capacity, across competing research priorities, balancing exploration against the bets most likely to compound.

• Protect deep-focus research time. Sustaining a long-term agenda in a fast-moving company means deliberately creating the space for rigorous, multi-quarter work, so the team can pursue ambitious bets instead of being fully absorbed by short-term applied demands.

• Raise the bar on research rigor and communication: strong experimental design, peer review, and reproducibility.

• Cultivate the team's standing in the broader research community. Real-world impact is our primary measure of success, but we actively encourage publishing, open-source contribution, and conference presence that build a reputation reflecting the quality of the work and help attract the best researchers.

Strategy & Cross-Team Collaboration

• Partner closely with senior technical leads who drive architecture and scientific direction, aligning operational execution with the long-term research roadmap so that scientific and operating decisions reinforce each other.

• Ensure clean handoffs from research into production, so breakthrough results land reproducibly in the hands of applied teams rather than stalling as one-off experiments.

• Translate complex, frontier technical progress (training efficiency, causal inference, novel architectures) into clear, high-impact narratives for executive leadership, connecting research milestones to business outcomes.

• Bridge foundational research and long-term business strategy, ensuring the team's technical inputs directly enable Nubank's AI-first direction.

We are looking for a person who has

You are an experienced research or engineering manager working at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research and Applied ML. You lead brilliant, highly autonomous researchers without micromanaging, and you know what it takes to sustain an ambitious, long-horizon research agenda inside a fast-moving company. You measure your success by what your team ships and discovers, not by your own keystrokes.

Basic Qualifications:

• Experience: 3+ years of direct people-management experience leading applied AI research or core machine learning teams at big tech companies, frontier labs, or comparable high-scale environments.

• Education: M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field, with a strong working understanding of core AI methodologies.

• Track record: Proven ability to build, scale, and retain high-performing research or advanced applied-science teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Technical depth: This is a management-first role, but deep conceptual familiarity with at least one of our core research areas is highly valued:
  Foundation models & LLMs: pre-training from scratch, scaling laws, training-optimization frameworks, and large GPU-cluster workflows.
  Behavioral & sequential models: sequence models, recommendation systems, and large-scale representation learning for very large user bases.
  Decisioning & optimization: causal inference, policy optimization, constrained optimization, or reinforcement learning.
  Training & inference efficiency: model sparsification, quantization, distillation, or parallelism and partitioning design.

• Communication: Exceptional storytelling skills, with a track record of translating complex technical milestones into business impact for senior and C-level audiences.

• Environment: Experience operating in global, distributed teams and navigating the path from foundational research to scalable, production-grade systems.

Why This Role

This is a rare chance to lead frontier AI research with a clear, compounding mission: building the intelligence layer of one of the world's largest digital banks. You'll work alongside strong ML researchers, with the data, compute, and executive backing to pursue genuinely ambitious bets, and to see those bets reach more than 130 million customers.

Location

Palo Alto, United States

 

Our Benefits

• Total compensation includes base salary, RSUs and benefits. Base salary: $324k

• Opportunity of earning equity at Nu

• Medical Insurance

• Dental and Vision Insurance

• Life Insurance and AD&D

• Extended maternity and paternity leaves 

• Nucleo - Our learning platform of courses

• NuLanguage - Our language learning program

• NuCare - Our mental health and wellness assistance program

• 401K

• Saving Plans - Health Saving Account and Flexible Spending Account

• Work-from-home Allowance

• Relocation Assistance Package, if applicable.

Work Model for this Role

Hybrid 2-3 times/week: Our hybrid work model brings us to the office at least twice a week, on strategic days designed to maximize team connection and collaboration. For more details, visit https://building.nubank.com/nu-hybrid-work-model/ 

Our recruitment process may involve the use of artificial intelligence–enabled tools, such as automated interview transcription and analysis, to support the evaluation process. Artificial intelligence is not used to make final hiring decisions; all decisions are made by human reviewers.

To maintain a consistent and fair process for every candidate, Nu does not provide individualized technical feedback. See how our policy works here