Chief AI Scientist

The Opportunity

Most AI roles ask you to apply someone else's research to someone else's problem.
This one is different.

We are building something in the professional productivity space that has not existed before. A new category - not an improvement on what's already out there. The kind of problem that requires original thinking, not fine-tuning.

We are looking for a Chief AI Scientist to be a co-architect of that - someone who will shape the technical soul of the company from day one. This is a founding team role. You will have real equity, real influence, and a real shot at building something that changes how millions of professionals work every day.

What You Will Work On
We cannot say everything here - and that is intentional. What we can tell you:

The core of what we are building is deeply technical and sits at the intersection of speech, language, and real-time inference
You will be working on problems that require novel approaches - not off-the-shelf solutions
You will own the AI research agenda entirely - from architecture decisions to model selection to what gets built next
Your work will be felt by users in the first second they use the product

If you need a detailed spec before you are interested, this is probably not the right role. If the above is enough to make you curious, keep reading.

The Pedigree We Are Looking For

We will be direct. This is a role for someone with an exceptional track record - not potential. We are a pre-seed company asking you to take a risk with us, and we owe you honesty about what that means. In return, we need someone who has already done the hard thing.

Specifically, we are looking for someone who has:
Research depth
— PhD in Machine Learning, NLP, Speech Processing, or a related field from a top-tier institution
— Published at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, Interspeech, or equivalent
— A research direction you have genuinely owned - not just contributed to Applied AI experience
— Built and shipped AI systems at scale - not just in notebooks
— Deep experience in one or more of: ASR / speech recognition, NLP / LLM fine-tuning, real-time ML inference, on-device / edge AI
— Prior role at a leading AI lab (OpenAI, DeepMind, Google Brain, Anthropic, Meta AI, Microsoft Research) or as the founding AI hire at a company that shipped
Builder mentality
— Comfortable moving between research and engineering
— Has made architecture decisions that turned out to be right
— Can work without a large team beneath them - at least for now

What This Is Not
— This is not a staff research scientist role with a team of 30 beneath you
— This is not a role where someone else sets the technical direction
— This is not the right role if you need a salary to feel secure right now
We respect all of those needs. They are just not what this role is.

Compensation
Before Seed Round
Equity only. We are at the stage where belief has to come before salary - and we are asking you to share that with us. Equity will be meaningful, founder-adjacent, and structured with full transparency.

After Seed Close (targeted within 6 months)
A market-rate to above-market cash package will kick in immediately at close - including base salary, performance bonus structure, and potential for continued equity refresh. We are not asking you to take equity forever. Just long enough for us to earn the right to pay you what you deserve.
Equity details

— Significant founding-team equity stake
— 4-year vesting, 1-year cliff (standard)
— Full acceleration on acquisition
— You will see the cap table before you decide