Research Lead

Abundant•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Research PM (RPM) is a role unique to Abundant. RPMs are PMs of the model, unlike traditional PMs who own an application or a feature. RPMs design and implement model capabilities, either as part of an AI lab, data lab, or other research organization. This is a founding-level role with outsized ownership.

Requirements

Technically fluent: Deep understanding of evaluations, RL, and how LLMs and Agents work.
Research-oriented — Able to read papers and keep up with SOTA literature.
Extreme owner — You have extreme agency and a founder mentality; you are resourceful and scrappy.
Creative problem solver — You leverage creativity and research skills to design projects from the ground up.
Must be highly proficient with coding agents such as Codex or Claude Code.

Responsibilities

Co-design capabilities of the model: define areas of improvement for the model, along with the Researcher.
Perform literature review: headroom analysis, identifying recent work in academic and industry circles.
Run experiments and benchmarks: using our internal simulation stack and our open source tooling such as Oddish to define and hillclimb on the vertical.
Become the voice of the model user: Talk to individual users and/or enterprises, in order to deeply understand where models and agents are underperforming, turning these insights into evaluation and training data.
Work on data pipelines: internal tooling to support research operations.