Head of AI Research

Kepler • New York City, NY

9h

About The Position

We're building the ground truth platform for AI. Generic tools hallucinate data, confabulate reports, and don't show their work. We made accuracy the only possible outcome: every answer traces to its source, every calculation is reproducible, every insight is defensible. We're starting in finance and building the foundational data layer for anywhere decisions depend on trustworthy data. Kepler was founded by two Palantir veterans (20 years combined) who built core parts of Gotham and Foundry, created Palantir Quiver (the analytics engine behind $100M+ deals with BP and Airbus), led major DoD projects, and served as Head of Business Engineering at Citadel. Kepler is backed by founders of OpenAI, Facebook AI, MotherDuck, dbt, Outerbounds, and others. 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. AI interprets intent. Code retrieves data. A semantic layer connects them. Every output traces to its source. Now we need someone to push the frontier of what's possible within this architecture. You'll lead research across agentic systems, memory architectures, retrieval mechanisms, and evaluation frameworks. You'll have access to completely differentiated financial data: structured filings, earnings transcripts, market feeds, research reports, live audio, all normalized with full provenance. This isn't another research lab building demos. Your work ships to production, powering research workflows where financial professionals make million-dollar decisions. This role is for researchers who want to build AI systems that actually work in high-stakes environments, where every answer must be defensible and every insight must trace back to truth.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related field
• 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. You understand the gap between paper and production.
• Technical depth: Expertise in transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, retrieval-augmented generation, or memory-augmented systems
• Leadership: Experience building and leading research teams in high-stakes environments
• Research taste: Ability to identify problems that are both technically interesting and practically important
• Strong communicator who can translate complex research into clear implications for product and business
• Intellectually humble. Confident enough to lead in your domain, wise enough to collaborate across disciplines.
• Energized by hard problems where the answer isn't known

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Publish and represent Kepler: Contribute to the broader AI community through publications, open-source work, and presence at top venues like NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.
• Collaborate with founders: Work directly with leadership on technical strategy, product direction, and company vision.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, 401k, insurance for employees and dependents
• Automatic coverage for basic life, AD&D, and disability insurance
• Daily lunch in office
• Development environment budget - latest MacBook Pro, multiple monitors, ergonomic setup, and any development tools you need
• Unlimited PTO policy
• "Build anything" budget - dedicated funding for whatever tools, libraries, datasets, or infrastructure you need to solve technical challenges, no questions asked
• Learning budget - attend any conference, course, or program that makes you better at what we're building

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree