Director, AI Research - Strategic Partnerships

WHAT YOU DO AT AMD CHANGES EVERYTHING   At AMD, our mission is to build great products that accelerate next-generation computing experiences—from AI and data centers, to PCs, gaming and embedded systems. Grounded in a culture of innovation and collaboration, we believe real progress comes from bold ideas, human ingenuity and a shared passion to create something extraordinary. When you join AMD, you’ll discover the real differentiator is our culture. We push the limits of innovation to solve the world’s most important challenges—striving for execution excellence, while being direct, humble, collaborative, and inclusive of diverse perspectives. Join us as we shape the future of AI and beyond.   Together, we advance your career.

AMD is looking for a Director, AI Research-Strategic Partnerships to lead our research collaborations with frontier AI labs and strategic model-development partners. This is a senior leadership role for someone who can set technical direction at the intersection of reinforcement learning, frontier model training, and AMD silicon—and turn those partnerships into measurable advances for both our partners' models and AMD's hardware and software roadmap.  THE PERSON: You will build and lead a team of AI researchers and research engineers, own the technical agenda across multiple lab partnerships, and serve as a credible scientific peer to the researchers we collaborate with. The ideal candidate is a recognized technical leader who has shipped real research, can still go deep on training pipelines and kernels when it matters, and knows how to translate frontier-lab needs into hardware and roadmap decisions. We are open to candidates who want to remain hands-on as player-coaches as well as those who lead primarily through their teams.

Define and own the AI research strategy for AMD's strategic lab partnerships, aligning joint technical roadmaps with AMD's hardware and software priorities  Build, lead, and mentor a high-caliber team of AI researchers and research engineers; set research direction, hiring bar, and standards for technical excellence  Serve as AMD's senior research counterpart to partner labs—earning credibility as a peer on reinforcement learning, model training, and large-scale systems  Drive joint research programs spanning RL training pipelines (e.g., async RL, importance sampling, reward modeling), GPU programming, kernel and PPA optimization, and frontier model performance on AMD platforms  Translate frontier-model requirements into concrete, prioritized input to AMD's hardware roadmap and software stack, partnering closely with silicon, architecture, and compiler teams  Establish IP-preserving collaboration architectures (e.g., confidential compute) that let AMD and partners co-develop while protecting each party's intellectual property  Set and track measurable goals for each partnership—model uplift, kernel and workload performance, and verifiable research milestones  Represent AMD's research agenda to executive leadership and to external partners; communicate results, trade-offs, and roadmap implications to both technical and business audiences  Stay at the frontier of AI research and translate emerging techniques into opportunities for AMD and its partners    PREFERRED EXPERIENCE: Demonstrated technical leadership in AI/ML research, with a track record of impactful published work and/or research shipped into production or frontier models  Deep, current expertise in one or more of: reinforcement learning, large-scale model training, GPU programming, and AI systems/performance optimization  Experience leading research teams and setting technical direction across multiple concurrent programs  Experience working with or inside frontier AI labs, or leading external research partnerships, with the credibility to operate as a scientific peer  Strong understanding of the hardware–software stack underpinning