Senior Research Specialist, AI & ML

To make electronics, you need chips, wafers, transistors, reticles, and... To make these, you must see, test and manufacture them at scale—faster and better than ever before. That's where KLA comes in. Whether you're early in your career or an experienced professional, you'll solve complex challenges, work alongside brilliant minds and help shape the future of technology. Group/Division The Semiconductor Products and Customers (Semi PC) business unit designs, builds and sells KLA’s product portfolio to help chip manufacturers meet high-quality standards for technologies like AI, data centers, automotive and electronic devices. Our inspection, metrology, and analytics systems detect and monitor defects across logic and memory chips, specialty semiconductors, wafers, reticles, advanced packaging, process equipment and materials. We also develop technologies for specialty processes, IC substrates, and PCB manufacturing, including etch and deposition, component inspection, and imaging and analytics. At KLA, physics and data are at the core of everything we do. Our AI and Modeling Center of Excellence drives innovation across KLA products by combining expertise in physics modeling, high-performance computing (HPC) and AI. The group is comprised of top-tier physicists, machine learning engineers, HPC architects and data scientists that collaborate to develop scalable, cutting-edge solutions for our customers. We’re hiring across multiple disciplines—this is your opportunity to make a global impact. What You'll Do In this role, you will play a key part in advancing business priorities by delivering high-impact work across your area of expertise. The work spans both applied and fundamental research. You will identify high-value research problems, formulate them mathematically, develop novel learning methods, build proof-of-concept systems, and conduct rigorous evaluations. Successful research outcomes will be translated into scalable solutions through collaboration with multidisciplinary engineering and domain teams. This role is not focused on building conversational assistants or connecting foundation models through predefined workflows. The central challenge is to develop intelligent systems that interact with analytical tools, reason over heterogeneous engineering data, make sequential decisions, and improve through feedback. We are looking for researchers who view agentic AI as a learning and decision-making problem involving observations, actions, tools, feedback, uncertainty, and measurable outcomes. We value scientific rigor and sound judgment, selecting methods based on the structure of the problem rather than on current trends. What You Will Work On You will develop intelligent systems capable of: Reasoning over images, text, measurements, metadata, and domain knowledge. Planning and executing multi-step analytical workflows. Selecting and invoking specialized algorithms, models, and software tools.