Our client is a stealthy applied AI lab engineering zero-intervention autonomous systems. Rather than building standard workflow copilots, they are developing full-stack AI infrastructure capable of entirely replacing traditional engineering and operational pipelines. Their core thesis centers on asymmetric leverage—building the foundational technology that allows a single operator to achieve the output of an enterprise-scale organization. They are bringing on a Head of Applied Research to lead their AI initiatives and architect the future of self-sustaining enterprises.
Role
Design and run experiments across model selection, prompting, tool-use, memory, planning, and multi-agent coordination.
Lead evaluations, building datasets, success criteria, and continuous benchmarks for real-world workflows.
Push performance by reducing tail latency and failure modes, and improving determinism, throughput, and cost per successful run.
Partner closely with engineering and product to ship weekly, while mentoring a small, senior team and setting standards for experiment design and code quality.
Pursue advanced memory research for multi-agent systems and push state-of-the-art results on custom agent systems.
Essential Skills
5-8+ years in applied ML/AI, ML systems, or research engineering, with high-ownership startup experience preferred.
Deep experience with LLMs and agentic systems, including prompting, function/tool calling, planning, retrieval/memory, and evals.
Track record of moving work from paper to prototype to production in Python, with comfort in distributed systems a plus.
Beneficial Skills
Published papers in AI/ML directly applicable to modern agentic systems.
Experience building reliable evaluation harnesses and curated datasets for multi-step tasks.
Familiarity with orchestration frameworks, streaming/real-time state sync, safety/guardrails, or reinforcement/online eval loops.
This is an in-person role based in New York, working directly with founders in a small, high-performance team tackling some of the most interesting problems in agentic AI.
$500k base + Founder's level equity.
If interested, reply and Goliath Partners will be in touch!
