AI Researcher

Ivo Inc.•San Francisco, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

AI Researchers are the engine of innovation at Ivo. You'll push the state of the art in applying LLMs, deep learning, and advanced AI techniques to the unique and high-stakes challenges of the legal domain — where accuracy, explainability, and robustness aren't nice-to-haves, they're the product. Your research will translate directly into features that redefine how legal professionals work. This isn't an academic role. It's a chance to see your research fundamentally change an industry.

Requirements

A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related quantitative field — or equivalent industry research experience with a comparable track record.
Evidence of exceptional ability — a paper, shipped system, open-source contribution, competition result, or hard problem you cracked that puts you meaningfully ahead of your peers.
Deep, hands-on experience in deep learning research and development, particularly with LLMs. Strong working knowledge of modern frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow) and the surrounding open-source ecosystem.
Expertise in at least one of: agentic systems, reasoning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, quantization, inference optimization (e.g., speculative decoding), hallucination mitigation, novel architectures in deep learning, or robust evaluation methodology for LLMs.
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex research findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
A bias toward action: you ship rather than perfect, you measure rather than guess, and you'd rather have a working prototype today than a polished plan next week.

Nice To Haves

Publications at top venues — e.g., ML/AI conferences (NeurIPS, AAAI, ICML, ICLR), or peer-reviewed journals in adjacent quantitative fields (Journal of Computational Physics, SIAM journals, Journal of the ACM, Nature, Science, PNAS) — or equivalent strong research contributions in industry.
Experience with long-context modeling, retrieval, or grounded generation in high-stakes domains (legal, medical, financial).
Prior work on hallucination detection, calibration, or interpretability.
A track record of building from zero in fast-paced startup or research environments.
Startup experience is preferred, but not required — the disposition matters more than the resume line.

Responsibilities

Advance the core AI platform. Design and implement novel approaches to the problems at the heart of Ivo's product: reasoning over long-context legal corpora, contract comparison and redlining, information extraction, and automated drafting and editing.
Make our models trustworthy. Conduct research on procedural hallucination detection and resolution, calibration, and explainability. In a domain where a single fabricated citation can sink a deal, the bar for groundedness is uncompromising — your job is to keep raising it.
Push frontier techniques into production. Explore and apply advanced fine-tuning, PEFT, and distillation techniques to make our models faster, cheaper, and more accurate on legal- specific tasks. Evaluate emerging work in agentic systems, long-context modeling, and reasoning, and figure out which ideas actually move the needle for our customers.
Build the evaluation infrastructure. Design and maintain datasets, benchmarks, and evals for training and measuring model performance on complex legal text. Define the metrics that matter, and hold the team to them.
Ship. Partner closely with Engineering and Product to take prototypes from notebook to production, write internal reports that influence the technical direction of the platform, and present findings to both technical and non-technical audiences across the company.