Head of AI Research
Lead AI research defining the agenda for trustworthy agentic systems, memory, retrieval, and evaluation frameworks. PhD required with 5+ years focused on LLMs/agents and a strong publication record; work ships directly to production for high-stakes financial users.
About the job
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
Skills
LLMs, Agentic Systems, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Memory Architectures, Transformer Architectures, Attention Mechanisms, Evaluation Frameworks, Multi-Step Reasoning, Context Management, Knowledge Representation
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