VP of Research, Machine Learning

Job description

About the Role A1 is building a proactive AI system that goes beyond responding to prompts – it maintains context across conversations, plans actions, and carries work forward over time. You will own the research and intelligence direction of this system. Your role is to define how AI reasons, evaluates, and improves in a product used with high frequency. What You'll Do: Set and evolve the research direction for A1’s 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 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....