Applied Research Lead - New York

Prime Intellect•New York, NY

10d•$150,000 - $300,000•Onsite

About The Position

Prime Intellect is hiring a senior regional player-coach to establish and lead its New York Applied Research group. The role combines personally led research and field programs with technical leadership, recruiting, and development of the group. The lead will turn consequential external problems into coherent research programs, oversee early experiments and deployments, and set research direction and technical and experimental standards as the team grows. Applied Research at Prime turns workflows into tasks, environments, evaluations, and reward signals; runs post-training experiments against real baselines; and deploys successful work. The team investigates whether results come from the model or from data, harnesses, inference, or infrastructure, then develops reusable components into shared research, open-source systems, and product capabilities. The role is externally facing, with direct work alongside customers, users, or research partners while maintaining a substantive research agenda. The position owns a small number of demanding New York partner and customer programs, the founding New York group's recruiting and development, and standards for environments, evaluations, post-training experiments, failure analysis, and deployed results. It also involves personal research, cross-program technical direction, and decisions about what should become shared research or product capability. The role is full-time and in-person at the company's New York City office.

Requirements

Track record leading high-performing applied-research or research-engineering teams.
Deep credibility in RL, post-training, agents, evaluation, or ML systems.
Exceptional recruiting judgment.
Experience with demanding external technical stakeholders.
Hands-on experience building and debugging model-training, post-training, agent, evaluation, or closely adjacent experimental loops.
Strong experimental judgment, including meaningful baselines, careful trace inspection, clear failure attribution, and willingness to change direction based on evidence.
Strong Python skills.
Ability to build artifacts that other researchers and engineers can run, inspect, and extend.
Comfort owning ambiguous problems and keeping partners and teammates current as problems are resolved.

Nice To Haves

Publications, open-source systems, benchmarks, or shipped products demonstrating exceptional work.
Ability to show a difficult artifact built, explain what failed, and describe how evidence changed the approach.

Responsibilities

Turn early New York field programs into research agendas with strong owners, comparable evidence, and clear paths from domain results to shared capabilities.
Personally lead a high-stakes program through environment design, baseline development, post-training, evaluation, and deployment.
Recruit and develop the founding New York Applied Research group.
Establish a working rhythm and review process that maintains rigor without slowing the team.
Set technical standards for environments, evaluations, post-training experiments, failure analysis, and deployed results.
Lead a small number of challenging partner and customer research programs while remaining directly involved in technical work.
Provide cross-program technical direction and make decisions about what becomes shared research or product capability.
Maintain a substantive personal research agenda and keep partners and teammates informed while resolving ambiguous problems.