# Head of Research

**Company:** [Ambral](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/ambral)
**Location:** New York, NY, San Francisco, CA
**Role:** AI Research
**Salary:** $250k – $400k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Reinforcement Learning, Llm Post-Training, Evaluation Systems, Agent Environments, Machine Learning, Python, Context Engineering, Agent Engineering, Observability, Open-Weight Models
**Posted:** 2026-09-01

> Leads the research agenda and hands-on development of replayable enterprise environments, agent evaluations, and post-training systems. The role requires deep AI research experience, a PhD or equivalent track record, and the ability to translate open-ended questions into production systems.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Own the research agenda for building a replayable environment engine over real enterprise history.
- Identify high-leverage technical questions and design experiments to answer them.
- Build systems that convert recorded enterprise data and task definitions into runnable environments.
- Design graders that turn ambiguous business objectives into verifiable rewards.
- Mine useful tasks, trajectories, and evaluation cases from historical workflows.
- Create representative, reproducible, and overfitting-resistant evaluation sets.
- Determine effective combinations of models, tools, context, and policies while reducing inference cost.
- Advance post-training methods for agents operating over long horizons, incomplete information, and large tool spaces.
- Build replay and observability systems that make agent behavior explainable and measurable.
- Scale to thousands of concurrent training and evaluation runs.
- Help establish research practices, evaluate technical progress, select research bets, and recruit and develop the research team.
- Collaborate directly with the CTO and deploy research into enterprise workflows.

## Requirements
- PhD in machine learning, computer science, mathematics, or equivalent significant research experience.
- Deep experience in reinforcement learning, LLM post-training, evaluations, agent environments, or closely related areas.
- Experience taking ambitious, open-ended research problems from hypothesis through experimentation to working systems.
- Ability to turn ambiguous business objectives into reliably evaluable tasks and signals.
- Ability to move between research and production implementation.

## Nice-to-haves
- Experience at a leading foundation model lab, top AI research organization, or high-performing AI startup.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Salary: $250,000–$400,000 per year.
- Significant equity and ownership.
- Equinox membership.
- Free meals, coffee, and snacks.
- Health insurance.
- Unlimited PTO.

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