AI Research Director
webAI is a sovereign AI platform that lets organizations build, deploy, and operate custom AI on their own infrastructure. It serves enterprise teams across industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, aviation, public sector, and retail.
Projects
About webAI
webAI provides a full-stack, locally operated AI platform for enterprises seeking private, controllable AI. Its platform includes Navigator for building, training, and deploying custom models; Companion, an on-device AI assistant; Runtime for distributed workload orchestration; webFrame for optimized inference and training; Network for secure local connectivity; and a CLI for programmatic management. The company emphasizes data sovereignty, local deployment, predictable costs, and support for edge devices and private clusters.
Skills
About the Role
You will set the long-term AI and machine learning research vision, lead experimentation and architectural innovation, and oversee work across language models, multimodal systems, edge inference, and distributed AI. You will develop efficient and privacy-preserving model techniques, evaluate emerging research, and turn validated breakthroughs into production-ready capabilities. You will also build and mentor researchers, establish rigorous experiments and benchmarks, and communicate research direction with customers, partners, and the AI community.
Requirements
- Read research papers daily
- Have 8+ years of experience in AI, machine learning research, deep learning, or related fields
- Have experience leading research teams and delivering impactful machine learning innovations
- Have expertise in transformers, diffusion models, multimodal systems, and reinforcement learning
- Have experience designing, training, and optimizing large-scale machine learning models
- Understand distributed systems, edge inference, and model-efficiency techniques including quantization and pruning
- Be proficient in Python and machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX
- Demonstrate a research background through publications, patents, or deployed innovations
- Communicate complex concepts to technical and non-technical audiences
- Hold a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
Responsibilities
- Lead AI and machine learning research strategy, including long-term vision, experimentation roadmaps, and architectural innovation
- Oversee research on large language models, diffusion models, multimodal models, inference optimization, and distributed execution
- Advance compression, quantization, distillation, and privacy-preserving learning techniques for edge and on-device AI
- Collaborate with Engineering and Product to translate research breakthroughs into scalable production-ready capabilities
- Build, mentor, and lead a research team
- Evaluate emerging technologies, academic research, and industry trends to influence strategic direction
- Design and evaluate experiments, benchmarks, and methodologies for model performance and efficiency
- Represent the organization in research discussions with customers, partners, and the AI community
- Align research initiatives with customer missions, security requirements, and enterprise needs
Benefits
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits
- 401(k) match
- Equity options
- $200/month Health & Wellness stipend
- $500/year Function Health subscription
- Free parking for in-office employees
- Flexible Time Off
- Parental leave for eligible employees
- Supplemental life insurance
