Research Scientist​/Senior Research Scientist

Vijil is the trust infrastructure enterprises need to deploy AI agents with confidence. Our platform helps organizations evaluate agents before deployment, enforce governance at runtime, and continuously harden them using production telemetry. Founded in 2023 by senior leaders from AWS and backed by Brightmind, Gradient and Mayfield, Vijil bridges the gap between capability and trust.

With $23M in funding and a Gartner Cool Vendor designation, Vijil is building the future of autonomous resilience, helping companies move from prototype to production in days rather than months.

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 — 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.

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.

At the senior level, lead and mentor. 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.

Vijil Labs is led by Tim G. J. Rudner and is responsible for the long-horizon scientific agenda  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 Vijil's customers depend on, and it is released openly through publications, technical reports and open-source artifacts on Git Hub and Hugging Face. See Vijil Labs .

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, you have a collaborative mindset, and you are excited to tackle ambitious research challenges as part of a team. 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.

To set you up for success, we look for:

• A PhD in computer science, statistics or a related technical field — or equivalent industry research experience.
• A strong publication record at top-tier machine learning venues, 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 edge of the field.
• Strong programming skills in Python and proficiency with at least one major deep learning framework (PyTorch, JAX or equivalent); experience using agentic coding tools; the ability to design and execute scientifically rigorous experiments at scale.
• Excellent written and verbal…