VP of Research, Machine Learning | Fully Remote (US)

Founding team. Serious backing. Real ownership.

We’re partnering with a newly launched AI company backed by an initial $100M commitment, building AI native productivity products for millions of everyday users. Their first product, an agentic email platform, is already in beta, and it’s the first of a planned portfolio of proactive AI applications that work with minimal prompting.

They’re now hiring a VP of Research, Machine Learning to own the intelligence behind the product: how the AI reasons, remembers, plans and improves in a product people use every day.

What you’ll do

• Set the research direction for core intelligence: context, memory, reasoning, planning and orchestration
• Decide when to build new model architectures versus adapting frontier open source or commercial models
• Define evaluation frameworks that measure real world usefulness, robustness and safety, not benchmark vanity
• Own alignment, safety and guardrail strategy as core product priorities
• Guide work on frontier techniques including retrieval augmented training, mixture of experts, distillation, multi agent orchestration and multimodal systems
• Partner closely with product and application engineering, and set the bar for research rigour across the company

What you’ll bring

• Deep experience building or evolving ML systems used in production
• Strong judgment on model behaviour, failure modes and long term trade offs
• A builder’s mindset and an obsession with evaluation and correctness
• Comfort making high impact decisions with incomplete information
• A founder mentality rather than a manager mentality
• Stack: Python, PyTorch / JAX, GPU based training and inference

This role suits someone who wants to ship intelligence into a real product, not someone focused mainly on publishing or running a large research organisation.

Why join

• Founding stage influence with significant capital already secured
• 30+ hires planned across Engineering, AI and Product
• 100% remote across the US
• Salary is extremely negotiable for the right person
• Cash plus equity, with health, dental and life insurance and a 401(k) match

Candidates must be based in the US and authorised to work here without visa sponsorship.

Interested? Apply here or message me directly for a confidential conversation.

Darwin Recruitment is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.

Levi Bergoff