Clayton Sanford
Senior Research Scientist at Google
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolClayton Sanford is a Senior Research Scientist with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia and over a decade of experience at the intersection of machine learning and theoretical computer science. He focuses on the mathematical foundations of neural networks—especially transformers—to improve interpretability, transparency, and accountability, work that was supported by an NSF GRFP. Clayton has transitioned from academic research to industry roles at Google (student researcher to senior research scientist) and internships at Microsoft and AI2, where he combined theory with large-scale empirical studies and climate and combinatorial applications. He has a strong track record of proving theoretical advantages for model classes while training transformers at scale for complex reasoning tasks. Based in San Francisco, he’s actively seeking full-time ML research roles in NYC and brings both deep theory chops and practical systems experience. An unusual strength is his sustained ability to move between formal proofs and production-scale model training, which lets him both certify and scale novel ML ideas.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Applied Mathematics-Computer Science, GPA: 3.9, Bachelor of Science - BS, Applied Mathematics-Computer Science, GPA: 3.9 at Brown UniversityDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Computer Science at Columbia University in the City of New YorkSoquel High SchoolMaster of Philosophy - MPhil, Computer Science, Master of Philosophy - MPhil, Computer Science at Columbia University
English, Spanish
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (8)
parameterization8
spark3
hdfs3
neural-network2
jenkins1
audio1
mesos1
gstreamer1
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
chsanford/chsanford.github.io
Aug 2016 - Aug 2025
Contributions:76 pushes, 1 branch in 9 years 1 month
chsanford/blog
Oct 2019 - Jun 2025
Contributions:13 PRs, 60 pushes, 14 branches in 5 years 8 months
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