VP of Research, Machine Learning

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

Set the research direction for the intelligence behind a high-frequency AI product, and answer for how it behaves in the real world.

The Opportunity

Our client is hiring the person who decides how its AI reasons, evaluates itself and improves. A well-funded AI applications company, backed by an established technology company in Southeast Asia and building for a global market, they are building AI-native versions of the everyday software people use many times a day. The VP of Research owns the research and intelligence direction of that system: context, memory, reasoning, planning and orchestration, plus the evaluation and safety strategy that keeps it honest. The client describes the seat as a founder’s role rather than a manager’s. It suits a builder with research depth who cares more about systems that work than about papers.

Role Snapshot

• Location: United States, United Kingdom, Singapore or China
• Work Model: Varies by location; confirmed on intro call
• Employment Type: Full-time
• Compensation: Competitive, shared on intro call
• Team: Research leadership, machine learning

What You’ll Own

• 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.

What You Bring

• 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.

Why This Role

• You set the direction: architecture choices, build-versus-adapt decisions and the evaluation philosophy are yours.
• Research with a product attached, used at high frequency, so your decisions show up in real behavior quickly.
• Safety and alignment treated as product concerns with an owner, not an afterthought.
• A small, hands-on team working in Python, PyTorch and JAX on GPU-based training and inference systems.

Not the Right Fit If

• Your main goal is publishing.
• You are motivated by incremental benchmark gains rather than real-world usefulness.
• You want to manage a large research organization. The client says plainly that this role will not suit you.