Job Description

Role: Founding Applied Researcher

Location: San Francisco, CA

Commitment: Full-Time, In Person

Salary: up to $300k + 2% equity

Must have previous AI/Multimodal/Generative systems experience

About the Role

Our client are building a fast-growing marketplace connecting elite creative talent award-winning artists, filmmakers, designers, and musicians with leading AI labs developing next-generation generative media models (e.g., state-of-the-art video, audio, and multimodal systems).

A small, high-talent-density team with backgrounds from top universities and research-driven organizations, backed by founders and senior researchers from frontier AI labs and industry-leading research groups.

They value initiative over instruction, autonomy over consensus, and reward exceptional talent with exceptional upside both in compensation and impact.

Role Overview

As a Founding Applied Researcher , you will design and build the next generation of generative media benchmarks evaluations that meaningfully push the boundaries of what foundation models can understand, generate, and perform.

You will collaborate directly with researchers at frontier labs and fast-moving startups, helping define evaluation standards for multimodal and generative systems. This is a rare opportunity to own critical research efforts from day one, work on deeply novel challenges, and shape the direction of the field.

What You’ll Do

• Design, develop, and validate new benchmarks that test advanced real-world capabilities in generative media models
• Create novel evaluation methodologies, including dataset construction, task formulation, and scoring frameworks
• Collaborate closely with researchers at leading AI labs to identify gaps in existing evaluation pipelines and define new standards
• Prototype and iterate rapidly, balancing scientific rigor with practical constraints
• Influence research direction and help define best practices for a growing applied research organization

What We’re Looking For

Academic & Research Background

• Master’s degree or PhD in Machine Learning, NLP, Computer Science, or a related field
• Exceptional undergraduates with strong research track records are also encouraged to apply
• Demonstrated research excellence through publications at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, or similar

Technical Skills

• Strong proficiency in Python for research, prototyping, and experimentation
• Experience with evaluation, benchmarking, or model analysis
• Familiarity with multimodal systems, generative models, or foundation model behavior is a plus

Mindset & Attributes

• Strong initiative and comfort operating autonomously
• Eagerness to tackle open-ended problems with no established playbook
• Ability to collaborate with industry researchers and clearly communicate findings

Compensation & Ownership

• Competitive equity package with true founding-level ownership
• Opportunity to define foundational research culture and influence product direction from inception

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