Chief AI Research Architect for Real-World Systems

Axe Recruiting; Singapore; Hybrid; SGD 300,000 - 520,000; Full time

Job summary

Axe Recruiting is seeking a founder-style leader to set the research direction for the product’s core intelligence, including context, memory, reasoning, planning and orchestration. This role shapes how the AI reasons, evaluates itself and improves in real-world use.

You will balance new model architectures with adapting frontier open-source or commercial models, and build evaluation frameworks focused on safety, robustness and long-term behavior. A hands-on, ownership-driven leader will thrive.

Qualifications

• Deep experience building or evolving machine learning systems that run in production.
• Sound technical judgment about model behavior, failure modes and long-horizon trade-offs.
• A builder’s outlook: working systems in the real world matter more to you than ideas alone.
• Ease making high-impact or irreversible decisions on incomplete information.
• A fixation on evaluation, correctness and how systems behave over time.
• High ownership: you operate like a founder, not a manager.

Responsibilities

• Define the research agenda for the product’s core intelligence (context representation, memory, reasoning, planning, orchestration) and keep it moving.
• Make the call between designing new model architectures and adapting or adopting frontier open-source or commercial models.
• Build evaluation frameworks around real-world usefulness, safety, robustness and long-term behavior instead of benchmark scores.
• Treat alignment, safety and guardrails as core product concerns, and own the strategy for them.
• Direct exploration of frontier techniques, among them distillation, mixture-of-experts, retrieval-augmented training, multimodal systems and multi-agent orchestration.
• Work closely with product and application engineering to shape the early direction of the product’s intelligence.
• Establish the organization’s standard for research rigor, judgment and taste.

Skills

Machine learning systems

Production systems

Model behavior evaluation

Safety and alignment

Decision making under uncertainty

Research strategy

Tools

Python

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

Axe Recruiting is seeking a founder-style leader to set the research direction for the product’s core intelligence, including context, memory, reasoning, planning and orchestration. This role shapes how the AI reasons, evaluates itself and improves in real-world use.

You will balance new model architectures with adapting frontier open-source or commercial models, and build evaluation frameworks focused on safety, robustness and long-term behavior. A hands-on, ownership-driven leader will thrive.