Research Scientist​/Senior Research Scientist, Fundamental Research

Research Scientist / Senior Research Scientist

Vijil is looking for Research Scientists and Senior Research Scientists who will conduct fundamental research at the frontier of trustworthy AI. As a member of Vijil's Fundamental Research team, you will pursue original research on scalable oversight of frontier AI systems and on trustworthy AI agents and multi-agent systems. You will publish your work at top-tier machine learning venues and translate it into platform capabilities used by AI developers and enterprises.

Vijil is an AI software startup on a mission to help organizations build and operate autonomous agents that they can trust. Founded by technologists who built the deep learning platform in Amazon Sage Maker at AWS and established responsible AI practices at Twitch and Splunk, Vijil is helping AI developers make AI agents trustworthy. If you're passionate about improving the reliability, safety, and security of AI agents that are used in high-stakes, mission-critical settings, you'll enjoy making an impact n us today to grow with the company and its products and customers.

The Fundamental Research team is led by Tim G. J. Rudner and is responsible for the long-horizon scientific agenda  team's mandate is to develop the foundational research insights that enable verifiable trust in AI agents at scale: identifying agent-specific failure modes, improving the robustness of multi-agent systems, advancing scalable oversight of frontier AI models, and creating the technical artifacts that make effective AI governance possible.

We work in close collaboration with academic partners at the University of Toronto, the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the University of Oxford, and other leading research institutions. Our research directly informs the tools that Vijil's customers depend on, and our research is released openly through publications, technical reports, and open-source artifacts on Git Hub and Hugging Face.

As a Research Scientist / Senior Research Scientist on the Fundamental Research team, you will:

• Drive original research. Define and pursue research projects at the intersection of trustworthy machine learning, generative modeling, and agentic AI.
• Publish and present. Publish your findings at top-tier machine learning venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, UAI, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, FAccT, COLT) and present them at conferences, workshops, universities, and industry events.
• Work with external collaborators and maintain relationships with relevant research labs and key individuals as appropriate.
• Translate research into product. Collaborate with applied scientists and engineers to turn prototypes into production capabilities that ship in the Vijil platform — measurably improving the reliability, security, and safety of the AI agents our customers deploy in the real world.
• (Senior) Lead and mentor. At the senior level, you will additionally set research direction for sub-areas of the team's agenda, mentor junior researchers and applied scientists, supervise external collaborations, and represent Vijil's research in external forums.

You are a passionate and talented researcher with a strong foundation in machine learning and a proven ability to conduct impactful, independent research. You embrace change and thrive under ambiguity, and you have a collaborative mindset and are excited to work as part of a team to tackle ambitious research challenges. You are eager to see your research translated into systems that have real-world impact, and you are driven by a desire to ensure that frontier AI is developed in a way that is reliable, safe, and broadly beneficial.

In order to set you up for success, we look for the following:

• PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, or a related technical field — or equivalent industry research experience.
• Strong publication record at top-tier machine learning venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, UAI, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, FAccT, COLT) demonstrating sustained, independent research contributions.
• Deep technical foundations in machine learning, statistics, and probability — with the mathematical maturity to read, evaluate, and contribute to the cutting…