Raydar
Head of Research
$500K–$750K
New York, New York +1 · Director · Full-time · Posted Oct 13, 2026
- Location
- New York, New York
Seattle, Washington - Experience
- 8+ years as a research scientist or applied researcher.
- Visa sponsorship
- Existing visa transfers and new sponsorship may be considered.
About the job
Leads the applied research roadmap and team, while conducting hands-on reinforcement learning and post-training research with customer labs to improve AI model capability.
What you'll do
- Set research priorities, allocate resources, and own the applied research roadmap; hire and grow the research team.
- Work with customer labs on reinforcement learning and post-training, and run experiments to improve environments, datasets, and trajectories.
- Partner with engineering, delivery, and go-to-market teams to turn research into production-ready deliverables.
What they ask for
- Lead researcher experience at a frontier lab, recognized emerging AI lab, or AI data lab.
- A notable published paper or released model with strong results on a recognized benchmark.
- Applied reinforcement learning model-training expertise demonstrated through professional work or substantial projects.
- Ability to set research direction, lead research efforts, recruit a strong team, and remain hands-on.
Nice to have
- Experience at a leading frontier AI lab.
- A PhD involving reinforcement learning research or published NLP research; experience with GRPO on Qwen 2.5.
Pay
$500,000-$750,000 annual base salary
Tools
reinforcement learning, GRPO, Qwen 2.5
AI focus
Applied reinforcement learning and post-training research, including developing environments, datasets, and trajectories to improve model capability.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative