VP of Research, Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) Required, Work From Home

Next Step Systems•San Francisco, CA

3d•$225,000 - $275,000•Remote

About The Position

The VP of Research, Machine Learning (ML) will own the research and intelligence direction of this system. The VP of Research, Machine Learning (ML) will define how Artificial Intelligence (AI) reasons, evaluates, and improves in a product used with high frequency. This position is 100% Remote.

Requirements

Deep experience building or evolving real Machine Learning (ML) systems used in production.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) experience required.
Strong technical judgment around model behavior, failure modes, and long-horizon trade-offs.
A builder’s mindset, you care about systems that work in the real world, not just ideas.
Comfortable making irreversible or high-impact decisions with incomplete information.
Obsession with evaluation, correctness, and how systems behave over time.
High ownership mentality; you operate as a founder, not a manager.
Tech Stack: GPU-based training and inference system, JAX, Python, and PyTorch.

Responsibilities

Set and evolve the research direction for the core intelligence, including context representation, memory, reasoning, planning, and orchestration.
Decide when to design new model architectures versus adapting or leveraging frontier open-source or commercial models.
Define evaluation frameworks that measure real-world usefulness, robustness, safety, and long-term behavior, not benchmark vanity.
Own alignment, safety, and guardrail strategy as first-class product concerns.
Guide exploration of frontier techniques such as retrieval-augmented training, mixture-of-experts, distillation, multi-agent orchestration, and multimodal systems.
Shape early product intelligence direction in close partnership with product and application engineering.
Set the technical bar for research rigor, judgment, and taste across the organization.