Founding AI Engineer

Title: Founding AI Engineer (Research & Systems)Target: PhDs & Research Masters from Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, CMU focused on AI, ML, NLP, Agents.Location: San Francisco, CA | On-SiteCompensation: $160K - $250K | 0.8% - 2.0% EquityVisa Sponsorship: Available (H1B, OPT, F1, TN, O1)About UsWe are a seed-stage startup, backed by Khosla Ventures and leading AI researchers, building the next generation of reasoning systems for AI agents. Our mission is to move beyond simple RAG and chain-of-thought, creating models that can dynamically plan, execute, and learn in complex environments. Our technical founder is a former Research Lead from Google DeepMind.The RoleWe are looking for our first AI hire to own the research and implementation of our core agentic models. You will be responsible for turning groundbreaking research papers into robust, scalable systems. This is a rare opportunity to work on cutting-edge problems like long-horizon planning, tool-use optimization, and self-improving agents, with the compute resources to test your ideas at scale.Ideal ProfileCurrently pursuing or recently completed a PhD/MSc in Computer Science, AI, or a related field.Publication record at top conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL) is a huge plus.Deep, hands-on experience with PyTorch, transformer architectures, and reinforcement learning.Experience with frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, or AutoGen is preferred, but a strong fundamental understanding of what they abstract is more important.You read ML papers and immediately think about the implementation details and edge cases.You are passionate about both theoretical rigor and shipping code that works.Apply if you've done research in: Multi-agent systems, RLHF, reasoning, planning, memory architectures, or program synthesis.