VP of Research, Machine Learning

About the Role

A1 is building a proactive AI system that goes beyond responding to prompts – it maintains context across conversations, plans actions, and carries work forward over time. You will own the research and intelligence direction of this system. Your role is to define how AI reasons, evaluates, and improves in a product used with high frequency.

• Set and evolve the research direction for A1’s core intelligence, including context representation, memory, reasoning, planning, and orchestration.
• Decide when to design new model architectures versus adapting or leveraging frontier open-source or commercial models.
• Define evaluation frameworks that measure real-world usefulness, robustness, safety, and long-term behavior – not benchmark vanity.
• Own alignment, safety, and guardrail strategy as first-class product concerns.
• Guide exploration of frontier techniques such as:
  • retrieval-augmented training
  • mixture-of-experts
  • distillation
  • multi-agent orchestration
  • multimodal systems
• Shape early product intelligence direction in close partnership with product and application engineering.
• Set the technical bar for research rigor, judgment, and taste across the organization.

• Deep experience building or evolving real machine learning systems used in production.
• Strong technical judgment around model behavior, failure modes, and long-horizon trade-offs.
• A builder’s mindset: you care about systems that work in the real world, not just ideas.
• Comfortable making irreversible or high-impact decisions with incomplete information.
• Obsession with evaluation, correctness, and how systems behave over time.
• High ownership mentality — you operate as a founder, not a manager.

• Python
• PyTorch / JAX
• GPU-based training and inference system

The best products today in the world were built by small, world class teams. We are a high talent density and hands-on team. We make decisions collectively, move at rapid speed, striking a balance between shipping high quality work and learning. Joining our team requires the ability to bring structure, exercise judgment, and execute independently. Our goal is to put in hands of our users a truly magical product.