Research Scientist Hierarchical Sensorimotor Perception
A 501(c)(3) science-and-technology research institute/foundation operating direct Neuro-AI research, life-sciences programs through Radial, and an open-science residency program.
About Astera Institute
Astera Institute supports and operates open public-goods work for science and technology. Its current activities include neuroscience-informed AGI research, AI-enabled life-sciences programs, open datasets and publishing infrastructure, and residencies for early-stage projects.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will develop and implement bidirectional and recurrent architectures for hierarchical perception that support flexible querying, variable abstraction, planning, and reasoning. You will design experiments to benchmark existing architectures for out-of-distribution generalization. You will translate mathematical frameworks into scalable systems and contribute to open science.
Requirements
- Strong foundations in deep learning, graphical models, and information theory
- Expert-level proficiency with PyTorch or JAX
- Clean, reproducible research coding skills
- Demonstrated interest in AI robustness, generalization, and common-sense reasoning
- Passion for computational and architectural principles of the mammalian brain
- Ability to thrive in a lean, fast-paced environment with high autonomy
Responsibilities
- Develop and implement bidirectional and recurrent architectures for hierarchical perception
- Design experiments to test and benchmark architectures for out-of-distribution generalization
- Translate abstract mathematical frameworks into scalable systems with neuroscientists and software engineers
- Innovate publication models and support open-source code releases and open access