Lead Applied Researcher

The role

You will lead the founding New York Applied Research group by personally leading research programs and recruiting researchers. You will turn field programs into research agendas and establish technical standards for environments, evaluations, and post-training experiments.

What you will do

• Turn New York field programs into research agendas
• Lead high-stakes programs through environment design, post-training, evaluation, and deployment
• Recruit founding New York researchers
• Own a small number of hard New York partner and customer research programs
• Recruit and develop the founding New York Applied Research group
• Set technical standards for environments, evaluations, post-training experiments, failure analysis, and deployed results
• Conduct meaningful personal research
• Work directly with customers, users, or research partners

Required qualifications

• Track record leading high-performing applied-research or research-engineering teams
• Deep credibility in RL/post-training/agents/evaluation/ML systems
• Exceptional recruiting judgment
• 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
• Strong Python
• Ability to build artifacts that other researchers and engineers can run, inspect, and extend
• Comfort owning ambiguous problems

Nice to have

• Publications
• Open-source systems
• Benchmarks
• Shipped products

Benefits

• Cash Compensation Range of $150-300k + equity incentives
• Visa Sponsorship & relocation support
• Professional Development budget
• Team Off-sites & conference attendance

About the company

Prime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack, providing infrastructure for frontier AI labs. The company has raised $150M in total funding from investors including Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, and NVIDIA.