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!