Chief Scientist – Artificial Intelligence Research

Description

Are you a senior AI researcher with a burning desire to serve a bigger purpose?

Are you motivated by challenges facing our nation’s security and prosperity?

Does the challenge of pioneering AI research with mission intent excite you?

We re looking for someone to be the Chief Scientist for the Artificial Intelligence Group at JHU/APL. Our team works at the intersection of AI research and national defense, tackling problems that few other institutions are trusted to solve. Some examples of our current work include:

• Improving alignment of AI agents used in human-machine teaming and wargaming
• Training multimodal foundation models on language and sensor data
• Intelligent robots that use agentic AI to perform complex tasks in a self-directed way
• Assessing, mitigating, and exploiting vulnerabilities of frontier models
• Mission-driven test and evaluation (T&E) of novel research

As Chief Scientist, you will be recognized as a thought leader while serving as a steward of APL’s AI research strategy — ensuring the success of the group as much as your own. In close partnership with the Group Supervisor, you ll help shape the future of our research by managing the group s Independent Research and Development (IRAD) portfolio, ensuring projects led by early- and mid-career staff are of the highest quality and aligned with national priorities.

While our IRAD process is competitive, this role provides opportunities to carve out resources for your own initiatives where they advance APL’s strategic goals.

Beyond managing research, you ll represent APL in the AI community by publishing, presenting, and collaborating with peers across academia, industry, and government. Your role as a connector and collaborator will help ensure that APL s contributions to AI research remain innovative, mission-relevant, and widely recognized.

In this role, your influence will come not only from advancing your own research but from amplifying the success of the group — mentoring colleagues, elevating their work, and ensuring that our collective research is rigorous, trustworthy, and consequential. You will be a steward of the group s success, balancing your own technical contributions with the responsibility of advancing the research of others.

You will also guide proposals to government sponsors, safeguard the technical rigor of our work, and help translate research into real-world applications at national scale. At its heart, this position is about bridging cutting-edge AI with mission-critical problems — advancing the state of the art while directly contributing to our nation’s security and resilience.

You meet our minimum qualifications for the job if you...

• Have a PhD in a field related to AI.
• Have 10+ years of experience in AI research and development.
• Are proficient in Python programming with experience using PyTorch and/or Jax, including Hugging Face libraries (transformers, diffusers, datasets, tokenizers, etc.).
• Have a strong record of peer-reviewed publications in reputable journals and/or conferences.
• Have experience writing and winning proposals for research funding.
• Have successfully led a research agenda for a team.
• Are able to obtain an Interim Top Secret level security clearance by your start date and can ultimately obtain a Top Secret level clearance. If selected, you will be subject to a government security clearance investigation and must meet the requirements for access to classified information. Eligibility requirements include U.S. citizenship.

You ll go above and beyond our minimum requirements if you...

• Are skilled at mentoring and developing early-career researchers
• Communicate research clearly to both expert and non-expert audiences
• Are effective at communicating research findings to non-expert audiences
• Enjoy mentoring promising early-career researchers
• Have formal experience in project management or technical supervision
• Have worked in government labs, research agencies, or frontier AI companies
• Already hold a Top Secret/SCI clearance.

Why Work at APL?

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) brings world-class expertise to our nation’s most critical defense, security, space…