Senior Research Scientist – AI

Primary

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Primary is building the infrastructure to change the recognition, audience, and rewards for journalists. Primary Index is the first AI-native ranking system for journalism, serving as the credibility standard for news in the AI economy. The company evaluates individual journalists based on the accuracy, depth, and craft of their published work using a purpose-built AI and a transparent methodology. The role involves tackling the hard problem of creating AI systems that can faithfully assess factuality, evidence quality, source reliability, and editorial balance at scale. The successful candidate will help define and lead the next generation of AI systems for automated knowledge acquisition, reasoning, and evaluation, working closely with the Chief Scientist and senior leaders to shape the scientific direction of Primary’s AI research. This includes implementing and evaluating novel AI methods, formulating new research questions, designing new AI architectures, and identifying opportunities to advance the state of the art. Current research programs include large-scale evaluation and scoring of published journalism; AI systems that assess factuality, neutrality, evidence quality, and source reliability; high-throughput local inference over very large text collections; adaptation and fine-tuning of open-weight language models; knowledge representation and reasoning for AI systems; and new methods for evaluating, aligning, and improving AI systems.

Requirements

A PhD in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer science or a very closely related discipline, or equivalent evidence of research achievement.
An outstanding record of original contributions to AI research.
Demonstrated ability to formulate, implement and evaluate novel AI methods or architectures.
Broad understanding across modern AI, including language models, learning, reasoning and knowledge representation.
Excellent scientific and engineering judgement and intellectual independence.
Outstanding written and verbal communication skills.

Nice To Haves

First-author publications introducing new AI methods, architectures or learning algorithms.
Substantial contributions to influential AI research programmes.
Demonstrated leadership of ambitious AI research projects.
Widely used research software or open-source AI systems.
Evidence that your work has influenced subsequent AI research or practice.
Ability to take a broad objective and independently formulate scientific questions, identify technical obstacles, propose architectural alternatives, determine learning objectives and evaluation methodologies, design and lead a research program, and produce AI systems that materially advance the state of the art.

Responsibilities

Define and lead research projects and programmes in artificial intelligence.
Formulate new AI architectures, learning algorithms and evaluation methodologies.
Identify high-value research opportunities and translate them into executable programmes of work.
Design AI systems that combine language models, reasoning and knowledge identification, representation, understanding and use.
Develop novel approaches to large-scale content evaluation and knowledge representation.
Lead experimental design and interpretation.
Effectively employ and critically evaluate AI-based software development tools.
Mentor and collaborate with research engineers and contribute to the scientific development of the team.
Communicate results through technical reports and publications in leading AI venues.