VP of Research, Machine Learning
darwin recruitmentMillbrae (CA)
VP of Research, Machine Learning
Posted today
darwin recruitmentMillbrae (CA)
SENIORITY
Manager
About the role
VP of Research, Machine Learning | Fully Remote (US) Founding team. Serious backing. Real ownership. We're partnering with a newly launched AI company backed by an initial $100M commitment, building AI native productivity products for millions of everyday users. Their first product, an agentic email platform, is already in beta, and it's the first of a planned portfolio of proactive AI applications that work with minimal prompting. They're now hiring a VP of Research, Machine Learning to own the intelligence behind the product: how the AI reasons, remembers, plans and improves in a product people use every day.
What you'll do:
- Set the research direction for core intelligence: context, memory, reasoning, planning and orchestration
- Decide when to build new model architectures versus adapting frontier open source or commercial models
- Define evaluation frameworks that measure real world usefulness, robustness and safety, not benchmark vanity
- Own alignment, safety and guardrail strategy as core product priorities
- Guide work on frontier techniques including retrieval augmented training, mixture of experts, distillation, multi agent orchestration and multimodal systems
- Partner closely with product and application engineering, and set the bar for research rigour across the company
- What you'll bring
- Deep experience building or evolving ML systems used in production
- Strong judgment on model behaviour, failure modes and long term trade offs
- A builder's mindset and an obsession with evaluation and correctness
- Comfort making high impact decisions with incomplete information
- A founder mentality rather than a manager mentality
Stack: Python, PyTorch / JAX, GPU based training and inference
This role suits someone who wants to ship intelligence into a real product, not someone focused mainly on publishing or running a large research organisation.
Why join:
- Founding stage influence with significant capital already secured30+ hires planned across Engineering, AI and Product 100% remote across the USSalary is extremely negotiable for the right person
- Cash plus equity, with health, dental and life insurance and a 401(k) match
- Candidates must be based in the US and authorised to work here without visa sponsorship.
Before you apply
Applying takes about a minute. These four things decide how fast it moves after that.
Your profile is current
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Two examples you can talk through
Not a portfolio — just two pieces of work where you can explain the decisions and what you'd change.
A number in mind
What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.
Your notice period
Employers plan around it, and it's the question that stalls offers most often.
Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.