Kepler AI

Head of AI Research

New York City

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 272 days ago

CI/CDMachine LearningdbtNLPLLMsRAGAgentic AIAI OrchestrationDesign SystemsResearchLeadershipCollaboration

About the role

You'll define the research agenda that makes AI trustworthy for enterprise decisions.
At Kepler, we've solved hallucination not by making models smarter, but by architecting systems where hallucination is structurally impossible.
Now we need someone to push the frontier of what's possible within this architecture.

Define the research agenda: Identify the highest-leverage research problems at the intersection of AI reliability, agentic systems, and enterprise trust. Shape what Kepler builds next.
Pioneer agentic architectures: Design systems for agent orchestration, task planning, and multi-step reasoning that maintain accuracy and provenance across complex research workflows.
Advance memory and retrieval: Build novel approaches to context management, knowledge representation, and retrieval that let agents reason over millions of documents while staying grounded in sources.
Build evaluation frameworks: Define how we measure agent quality, reliability, and trustworthiness. Create benchmarks that matter for real-world financial research.
Ship research to production: This isn't theoretical. Your work deploys to systems used by top financial institutions. Research validates through real-world impact.
Build and lead the research team: Hire exceptional researchers. Create an environment where breakthrough work happens and ships.
Shape what Kepler builds next.
Design systems for agent orchestration, task planning, and multi-step reasoning that maintain accuracy and provenance across complex research workflows.
Build novel approaches to context management, knowledge representation, and retrieval that let agents reason over millions of documents while staying grounded in sources.
Research validates through real-world impact.

5+ years in AI/ML research with focus on LLMs, agents, retrieval systems, or memory architectures
Publication record: Strong track record at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL)
Production experience: You've shipped research to real systems with real users.
Technical depth: Expertise in transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, retrieval-augmented generation, or memory-augmented systems
Research taste: Ability to identify problems that are both technically interesting and practically important

We're backed by investors who built the modern AI and data stacks, plus the builders of iconic commercial businesses.
This includes founders of OpenAI, Meta AI Research, MotherDuck, dbt Labs and Square as well as PebbleBed, Company Ventures and Mantis VC firms.

Create benchmarks that matter for real-world financial research.
Great teams compound.
Every hire raises the bar, every win gets named, every person gets the tools and runway to grow.
Kepler is an Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind.

100% covered top-of-the-line medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families.
HSA maxed by the company to the IRS limit.
Automatic coverage for life, AD&D, and disability insurance.
Unlimited PTO policy.
Learning budget - attend any conference, course, or program that makes you better at what we're building.
Work directly with leadership on technical strategy, product direction, and company vision.

The founding team spent a combined 40+ years at Palantir building the type of large-scale data infrastructure that Kepler requires.
Our co-founder created Palantir's first AI platform and built the analytics engine behind $100M+ contracts.
Our founding engineers led Foundry's core systems - Ontology, Fusion, Workshop, FoundryML - and scaled data products at Meta to 1B+ users.
We've paired this deep technical foundation with a repeat founder profile.
Our CEO built and scaled a data company to $15M ARR before successfully selling it.
He then became Citadel's first Head of Business Engineering, experiencing first hand the problems we are now solving.
We have a team who've been on both sides: building systems like this at massive scale and selling it into the buyers who need it most.
Define the research agenda for a company building the ground truth platform for AI.
Define your own agenda within our mission.
We are committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment.

Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind.

This listing is sourced directly from Kepler AI's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.