Member of Technical Staff, Research

ABOUT ABUNDANT Abundant https://abundant.ai is a research lab focused on identifying approaches to solve the longest-horizon tasks. This requires We pride ourselves on having an extremely talent-dense team united behind our long-term approach to building businesses.   THE ROLE As the Member of Technical Staff, you are the "PM of the model," architecting the next generation of model reasoning and intelligence. You will lead at the absolute frontier where research and execution collide, co-designing strategies alongside top-tier researchers from AI labs to push SOTA boundaries. This is a role for a technical visionary with a "founder mentality" and a bias for extreme ownership, infiltrating unknown domains—from chemical engineering to complex legal logic—to extract insights for high-stakes frontier projects that others find impossible.   WHAT YOU’LL DO - Foundational Capability Research & Execution: Architect and execute a core research agenda to discover simple, generalizable ideas that advance model reasoning and intelligence at scale. This includes owning the full research-to-production lifecycle and ensuring rapid deployment of your work in live systems. - Model Alignment & Data Strategy: Partner with the world's most advanced AI research teams to design, engineer, and iterate on high-impact datasets and large-scale benchmarking efforts that shape how frontier models behave, specifically focusing on critical alignment, safety, and defining optimal reward signals. - Autonomous Problem Selection: Autonomously identify, scope, and manage long-running research projects, choosing the most impactful problems that are critical to scaling data for AGI/ASI. - System Infrastructure: Collaborate closely with engineering teams on data pipelines, internal tooling, and high-performance deep learning algorithm implementations. WHO YOU ARE - Exceptional Research Depth & Strategic Vision: A PhD in a related field (e.g., CS, ML, NLP) with a world-class publication record (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) is preferred. You must possess the velocity to master complex fields and a proven track record in the productization of research, encompassing high-stakes evaluation, large-scale benchmarking, and product feature development. - Proven experience shipping research directly to production and live systems, specifically focusing on advanced post-training, distillation, and high-stakes evaluation methodologies. - Large-scale agent systems: orchestration frameworks, tool APIs, distributed execution, observability, and logging infrastructure. - Strategic & Ethical Leadership: You possess a thoughtful, strategic perspective on the societal and safety impacts of deploying general-purpose AI systems. Experience advising on or shaping governmental policy related to AI safety and governance is preferred.   COMPENSATION Base Salary $250,000 - $450,000 Cash Bonus Sizable performance bonus tied to project and company milestones Equity Generous early-stage grant Benefits Health, dental, vision + flexible PTO