Research Scientist / Senior Research Scientist

Vijil; Ottawa; Hybrid; CAD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base pay

Early-stage equity

Health, dental, vision insurance

Flexible time off

Parental/family leave

Immigration sponsorship

Conference/research compute budget

Open-source support

Job summary

Vijil seeks a Research Scientist to drive original research at the intersection of trustworthy machine learning and agentic AI. You will publish at top venues and collaborate with external partners to advance production-ready capabilities within Vijil’s platform.

The role requires mentoring junior researchers, translating prototypes into scalable systems, and leading research directions with impact on real-world AI governance and safety.

Qualifications

• PhD in computer science, statistics or a related field, or equivalent industry research experience.
• Strong publication record in top ML venues demonstrating independent research.
• Deep foundations in ML, statistics and probability; mathematical maturity.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to explain complex ideas clearly.

Responsibilities

• Drive original research at the intersection of trustworthy ML, generative modeling and agentic AI.
• Publish findings at top ML venues and present at conferences and events.
• Translate research into production capabilities within the Vijil platform.
• Lead and mentor junior researchers; supervise external collaborations.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

JAX

Research leadership

Independent research

Experiment design

Technical communication

Education

PhD in computer science or statistics

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

Research Scientist / Senior Research Scientist

Vijil is the trust infrastructure enterprises need to deploy AI agents with confidence. Our platform helps organizations evaluate agents before deployment, enforce governance at runtime, and continuously harden them using production telemetry. Founded in 2023 by senior leaders from AWS and backed by Brightmind, Gradient and Mayfield, Vijil bridges the gap between capability and trust.

With $23M in funding and a Gartner Cool Vendor designation, Vijil is building the future of autonomous resilience, helping companies move from prototype to production in days rather than months.

The role

Drive original research. Define and pursue research projects at the intersection of trustworthy machine learning, generative modeling and agentic AI.

Publish and present. Publish your findings at top-tier machine learning venues — NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, UAI, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, FAccT, COLT — and present them at conferences, workshops, universities and industry events. Work with external collaborators and maintain relationships with relevant research labs and key individuals.

Translate research into product. Collaborate with applied scientists and engineers to turn prototypes into production capabilities that ship in the Vijil platform, measurably improving the reliability, security and safety of the AI agents our customers deploy in the real world.

At the senior level, lead and mentor. Set research direction for sub-areas of the team's agenda, mentor junior researchers and applied scientists, supervise external collaborations, and represent Vijil's research in external forums.

The team

Vijil Labs is led by Tim G. J. Rudner and is responsible for the long-horizon scientific agenda at Vijil. Its mandate is to develop the foundational research insights that enable verifiable trust in AI agents at scale: identifying agent-specific failure modes, improving the robustness of multi-agent systems, advancing scalable oversight of frontier AI models, and creating the technical artifacts that make effective AI governance possible.

We work in close collaboration with academic partners at the University of Toronto, the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the University of Oxford and other leading research institutions. Our research directly informs the tools Vijil's customers depend on, and it is released openly through publications, technical reports and open-source artifacts on GitHub and Hugging Face. See Vijil Labs .

About you

You are a passionate and talented researcher with a strong foundation in machine learning and a proven ability to conduct impactful, independent research. You embrace change and thrive under ambiguity, you have a collaborative mindset, and you are excited to tackle ambitious research challenges as part of a team. You are eager to see your research translated into systems that have real-world impact, and you are driven by a desire to ensure that frontier AI is developed in a way that is reliable, safe and broadly beneficial.

To set you up for success, we look for:

• A PhD in computer science, statistics or a related technical field — or equivalent industry research experience.
• A strong publication record at top-tier machine learning venues, demonstrating sustained, independent research contributions.
• Deep technical foundations in machine learning, statistics and probability, with the mathematical maturity to read, evaluate and contribute to the cutting edge of the field.
• Strong programming skills in Python and proficiency with at least one major deep learning framework (PyTorch, JAX or equivalent); experience using agentic coding tools; the ability to design and execute scientifically rigorous experiments at scale.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. You can make complex ideas legible to researchers and non-research stakeholders alike.
• Demonstrated ability to conduct independent research end to end, from problem formulation through experimental design, analysis and dissemination.

For the Senior Research Scientist level, we additionally look for a track record of leading research projects and mentoring junior researchers; recognition in the field through invited talks, area chair service, well-cited contributions, open-source impact or equivalent signals; and experience translating research into production systems or shipped products, ideally in industry or at the research–product boundary.

Research areas we are especially excited about

We do not expect any single candidate to have experience across all of these. We are interested in researchers who go deep in one or two and have working knowledge across several.

• AI agents and multi-agent systems: planning, tool use, agentic evaluation, orchestration
• Preference optimization, RLHF, DPO and post-training of large language models
• Scalable oversight of frontier AI: debate, weak-to-strong generalization, process supervision, recursive reward modeling
• AI safety, alignment and robustness research
• AI security and adversarial ML: prompt injection, jailbreaks, data extraction, model evasion, red teaming
• Performance guarantees, PAC-Bayes, conformal prediction and generalization theory
• Reliable uncertainty quantification, calibration and out-of-distribution detection
• Formal verification of neural networks and learned components
• Mechanistic interpretability and analysis of model internals

Compensation and benefits

• Competitive base pay and meaningful early-stage equity
• Health, dental and vision insurance
• Flexible time-off policy
• Paid parental and family leave
• Immigration sponsorship
• A dedicated budget for conferences, research compute and publication
• Active support for open-source contributions and academic collaborations