Applied Research Lead

Skills

About the Role

You will lead high-stakes applied research programs from environment design and baselines through post-training, evaluation, and deployment. You will shape external problems into research agendas, recruit and develop the founding New York research group, set experimental standards, conduct personal research, and determine which results become shared research or product capabilities.

Requirements

• Track record leading high-performing applied research or research engineering teams
• Deep credibility in reinforcement learning, post-training, agents, evaluation, and machine learning systems
• Experience with demanding external technical stakeholders
• Hands-on experience building and debugging model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation, or adjacent experimental loops
• Experimental judgment involving baselines, trace inspection, and failure attribution
• Python
• Ability to build reusable research artifacts
• Experience with publications, open-source systems, benchmarks, or shipped products

Responsibilities

• Lead high-stakes partner and customer research programs
• Turn field programs into research agendas with clear owners and evidence
• Design environments, establish baselines, run post-training experiments, evaluate results, and support deployment
• Recruit and develop the founding New York Applied Research group
• Set technical standards for environments, evaluations, experiments, failure analysis, and deployed results
• Conduct personal research and provide cross-program technical direction
• Decide which work becomes shared research or product capability

Benefits

• Equity incentives
• Visa sponsorship
• Relocation support
• Professional development budget
• Team off-sites
• Conference attendance