Senior Research Scientist – AI

Primary

120d•$200,000•Onsite

About The Position

Primary is seeking a Senior Research Scientist to help define and lead research in AI systems for automated knowledge acquisition, reasoning, and evaluation. Working closely with the Chief Scientist and other senior leaders, the role will shape the scientific direction of Primary’s AI research and develop methods to assess journalism at scale, including its factuality, evidence quality, source reliability, and editorial balance. This is a research leadership role, not a management role. The successful candidate will formulate research questions, design AI architectures and methods, evaluate competing hypotheses, and lead research programmes through to deployed, high-impact systems. Research areas include large-scale evaluation of journalism; AI systems for factuality, neutrality, evidence quality, and source reliability; high-throughput local inference over large text collections; adaptation and fine-tuning of open-weight language models; knowledge representation and reasoning; and methods for evaluating, aligning, and improving AI systems. The role is based in New York City and is performed in person with the research team. The successful candidate is expected to become a scientific leader within the company, contributing to long-term research strategy as well as hands-on technical innovation. Work is expected to lead both to production deployment and publication at leading AI conferences and journals. AI-assisted software development is encouraged; scientific judgment, creativity, and technical leadership are emphasized over expertise in particular implementation frameworks.

Requirements

PhD in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer science, or a very closely related discipline, or equivalent evidence of research achievement.
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 judgment 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 the candidate’s work has influenced subsequent AI research or practice.
Ability to independently formulate scientific questions, identify technical obstacles, propose architectural alternatives, select learning objectives and evaluation methodologies, and lead a research programme that advances 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 with 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.
Contribute to long-term research strategy and hands-on technical innovation.