Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. bjakcareer is building a proactive AI system that maintains context across conversations and plans actions over time. The VP of Research, Machine Learning will own the research and intelligence direction, defining how AI reasons and evaluates, and setting the technical bar for research rigor across the organization.
Responsibilities
- Set and evolve the research direction for A1’s core intelligence, including context representation, memory, reasoning, planning, and orchestration
- Decide when to design new model architectures versus adapting or leveraging frontier open-source or commercial models
- Define evaluation frameworks that measure real-world usefulness, robustness, safety, and long-term behavior – not benchmark vanity
- Own alignment, safety, and guardrail strategy as first-class product concerns
- Guide exploration of frontier techniques such as:
- Retrieval-augmented training
- Mixture-of-experts
- Distillation
- Multi-agent orchestration
- Multimodal systems
- Shape early product intelligence direction in close partnership with product and application engineering
- Set the technical bar for research rigor, judgment, and taste across the organization
Skills
- Deep experience building or evolving real machine learning systems used in production
- Strong technical judgment around model behavior, failure modes, and long-horizon trade-offs
- A builder's mindset: you care about systems that work in the real world, not just ideas
- Comfortable making irreversible or high-impact decisions with incomplete information
- Obsession with evaluation, correctness, and how systems behave over time
- High ownership mentality — you operate as a founder, not a manager
Company Overview