Applied Researcher (Staff+)

The role

You will lead research projects in evaluation, benchmarks, deal prediction, simulation and self-improvement. You will build simulated companies and develop techniques for the AI system to improve as it operates.

What you will do

• Lead research projects in evaluation, benchmarks, deal prediction, simulation and self-improvement.
• Design empirical evaluations of Lightfield's AI system.
• Build benchmarks for core GTM tasks.
• Build simulated companies with users and streams of email, meetings and knowledge.
• Develop techniques that let Lightfield improve as it operates.
• Model deal probability and ship them as product features.
• Improve cost and quality trade-offs across the AI system.
• Publish research blog posts, open benchmarks, arXiv reports and papers.
• Recruit and mentor teammates.

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of applied research experience in ML or NLP, in industry or academia.
• PhD or MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning or a related field, or equivalent research experience.
• Track record of research that shipped or was published: papers, open-source models, datasets or benchmarks.
• Deep hands-on experience with LLMs, including evaluation, agent design and retrieval.
• Rigorous about experimental design.
• Strong Python.
• Comfortable working in a production codebase (TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL).
• Can drive an ambiguous problem independently.
• Communicate clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice to have

• Post-training experience (SFT, RL, preference optimization)
• Experience building simulations, synthetic data or RL environments.
• Experience with forecasting or predictive modeling on business data.
• Experience creating benchmarks adopted by others.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful early equity
• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision)
• 3 weeks of PTO
• 11 paid company holidays plus a winter holiday break
• 3 months of paid family leave
• Wednesdays work from home
• Regular team dinners, events, offsites, and retreats
• 401k plan
• Commuter and lunch stipend

About the company

Lightfield is reimagining CRM as a world model of a business. The team previously built Tome and has experience from Llama, Instagram, Google, and Salesforce.