Founding Research Scientist — New York, NY

Are you passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI to accelerate scientific discovery? This is a rare opportunity to join a pioneering, research led organization building AI that can drive science from hypothesis to experiment to result. As a Founding Research Scientist, you will play a central role in developing the next generation of agentic models capable of learning from experience, adapting in real time, and transforming how human and machine intelligence collaborate. This position is ideal for a deeply curious researcher ready to work hands on with real instruments and real data, driving innovation from first principles.

The Employer

This forward-thinking company, headquartered in New York, is revolutionizing how AI contributes to scientific research. Backed by a world class founding team with experience in materials science, automation, and machine learning, they combine expertise from leading academic and industrial labs. With a mission to create AI co-scientists that learn continuously from real world scientific work, they operate across pharma, biotech, materials science, and manufacturing, offering an unparalleled environment for cutting-edge research and impact.

Qualifications & Experience

• PhD or equivalent experience in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or related fields

• Proven research record with publications in top-tier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, or CVPR

• Multi-domain expertise across at least two of: vision, language, reinforcement learning, generative models, or robotics

Responsibilities

Join as a key contributor shaping foundational research in intelligent agent design.

• Lead research into continual learning and memory systems without retraining

• Develop multimodal learning methods to handle real world, partially observed data

• Create embodied agents that act, reason, and learn in real time

• Design evaluation metrics emphasizing adaptation and competence

• Publish in leading conferences and help define the next frontier in AI for science

Skills / Technical Competencies

• Proficiency in reinforcement learning, continual learning, reward modeling, and preference learning

• Strong background in data-driven experimentation using real world instruments

• Programming experience in frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow

• Comfort building and testing embodied or computer use agents

Nice to Haves

• Experience in memory models, post-training for large models, or long-term continual learning

• Prior work with AI for scientific research or experimental automation

• Hands-on experience with GUI, web, or embodied systems

This is a founding level opportunity with equity, competitive compensation, and the chance to shape a completely new era of intelligent scientific exploration. If you’re ready to move beyond benchmarks and help design AI that transforms the nature of experimentation, we’d love to hear from you.