Head of AI Research

Key Responsibilities

• Define the research agenda: Identify the highest-leverage research problems at the intersection of AI reliability, agentic systems, and enterprise trust. Shape what Kepler builds next.
• Pioneer agentic architectures: Design systems for agent orchestration, task planning, and multi-step reasoning that maintain accuracy and provenance across complex research workflows.
• Advance memory and retrieval: Build novel approaches to context management, knowledge representation, and retrieval that let agents reason over millions of documents while staying grounded in sources.
• Build evaluation frameworks: Define how we measure agent quality, reliability, and trustworthiness. Create benchmarks that matter for real-world financial research.
• Ship research to production: Deploy work to systems used by top financial institutions. Validate research through real-world impact.
• Build and lead the research team: Hire exceptional researchers. Create an environment where breakthrough work happens and ships.
• Publish and represent Kepler: Contribute to the broader AI community through publications, open-source work, and presence at top venues like NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.
• Collaborate with founders: Work directly with leadership on technical strategy, product direction, and company vision.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related field
• 5+ years in AI/ML research with focus on LLMs, agents, retrieval systems, or memory architectures
• Strong publication record at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL)
• Production experience shipping research to real systems with real users
• Expertise in transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, retrieval-augmented generation, or memory-augmented systems
• Experience building and leading research teams in high-stakes environments
• Strong communicator who can translate complex research into clear implications for product and business
• Intellectually humble and energized by hard problems

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience in high-stakes industries like finance, legal, or healthcare
• Background in building systems at massive scale (e.g., Palantir, Meta)

Benefits

• 100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and families; HSA maxed by company
• Automatic life, AD&D, and disability insurance coverage
• Daily lunch in office
• Unlimited PTO
• Development environment budget (latest MacBook Pro, multiple monitors)
• Open publication policy with conference budget for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR
• Dedicated GPU capacity for research
• Academic partnerships and differentiated data access for training and evaluation