Lead Applied Researcher - New York

What you'll do

• Lead partner and customer research programs from environment design and baselines through post-training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Recruit and develop the founding New York Applied Research team and set technical and experimental standards.
• Guide research direction and determine which results become shared research, open-source systems, or product capabilities.

What they ask for

• Track record leading high-performing applied-research or research-engineering teams; deep credibility in RL, post-training, agents, evaluation, or ML systems; exceptional recruiting judgment; and experience with demanding external technical stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience building and debugging model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation, or closely adjacent experimental loops.
• Strong experimental judgment, including meaningful baselines, trace inspection, failure attribution, and evidence-driven direction changes.
• Strong Python and ability to build artifacts other researchers and engineers can run, inspect, and extend.

Nice to have

• Publications, open-source systems, benchmarks, or shipped products demonstrating exceptional work.

Pay

$150-300k (base salary)

Tools

Python

AI focus

Applied research involving workflow-to-task and environment design, evaluations and reward signals, post-training experiments, agents, and deployment of AI models.