Senior Staff Research Scientist, Agentic AI & RL

Centific•East Palo Alto, CA

About The Position

Centific is seeking a Staff Research Scientist, Agentic AI & Reinforcement Learning. This dual-track role is designed for exceptional technical leaders who want to drive deep hands-on impact while growing their influence across research, engineering, and product. The role is suitable for individuals whose strength lies in individual technical contribution at the highest level or leading a small, elite team of researchers and engineers. The successful candidate will be a key architect of Centific’s Agentic AI and RL platform, responsible for designing and building governed RL environments, LLM post-training pipelines, and agentic reasoning systems that power enterprise AI products. This position involves bridging cutting-edge research with production-grade delivery, setting the technical standard for the team, and translating complex requirements into scalable systems. It is a high-ownership, high-autonomy role where the individual will define build processes, mentor colleagues, and be accountable for technical outcomes beyond just execution. The ideal candidate is deeply technical, entrepreneurially minded, and comfortable with writing production code, reviewing research, and shaping technical direction with stakeholders. The role offers two tracks: the IC Track (Senior Staff Engineer) focuses on being the deepest technical expert, owning architecture, setting implementation standards, and driving technical outcomes personally and through influence, with informal mentoring of 1-2 engineers. The Manager Track (Senior Manager) involves leading a focused team of 4-8 Research Scientists and RL Engineers, remaining deeply technical while also hiring, mentoring, and managing the team’s delivery and growth, with accountability for both people and technical outcomes.

Requirements

Exceptional technical leadership
Deep hands-on impact
Ability to drive influence across research, engineering, and product
Deeply technical
Entrepreneurially minded
Comfortable writing production code
Comfortable reviewing research
Comfortable shaping technical direction with stakeholders

Responsibilities

Design and build governed RL environments
Develop LLM post-training pipelines
Create agentic reasoning systems that power enterprise AI products
Bridge cutting-edge research and production-grade delivery
Set the technical bar for the team
Translate complex requirements into systems that work at scale
Define how things are built
Mentor those around you
Be accountable for technical outcomes
Own architecture (IC Track)
Set implementation standards (IC Track)
Drive breakthrough technical outcomes personally and through influence (IC Track)
Informally mentor 1-2 engineers (IC Track)
Lead a focused team of 4-8 Research Scientists and RL Engineers (Manager Track)
Review code (Manager Track)
Shape architecture (Manager Track)
Set research direction (Manager Track)
Hire, mentor, and manage the team’s delivery and growth (Manager Track)
Be accountable for both people and technical outcomes (Manager Track)