Applied Cognitive AI Scientist / Specialist

Aigo.ai - Pioneering Cognitive AI; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

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Job summary

Aigo.ai in the United States seeks an AI Psychologist to design and execute the journey from toddler to adult-level understanding for a cognitive AI. This role sits at the intersection of language, cognition, and AI development and requires close collaboration with engineers in tight iteration cycles.

You will build curricula, craft tests, and design knowledge ontologies to advance the system’s capabilities, while exploring new approaches to curriculum design and evaluation.

Qualifications

• Background in education, cognitive science, linguistics, or a related field.
• Strong command of English and exceptional analytical and writing skills.
• Ability to design tests and curricula from first principles rather than templates.
• Comfortable in a fast-moving development environment and working closely with engineers.
• Familiarity with current AI systems including LLMs is a plus; multilingual ability is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Designing and building curricula tailored to the AI’s cognitive needs at each development stage.
• Figuring out how the system could learn cognitively rather than by hardcoded rules.
• Identifying and co-developing new cognitive skills to expand capabilities.
• Creating question/answer sets, comprehension exercises, and structured conversations.
• Identifying gaps and failure modes and working with engineers to address them quickly.
• Independent research to develop new curriculum design and evaluation approaches.
• Evaluating natural language understanding across domains and cognitive tasks.
• Designing knowledge ontologies to bolster the system’s understanding.

Job description

We have developed and previously commercialized an AI that requires a million times less training data than LLMs, trains and runs on a single off-the-shelf computer, and learns and adapts incrementally in real time. The approach, called Cognitive AI, is based on first principles of human cognition and overcomes the cost, reliability, privacy, and security limitations of LLMs.

We are now on the final stretch of scaling this technology to full general adult-level ability and to bring it to the world. A multi-trillion-dollar opportunity.

If this vision excites you and you are available to fully dedicate yourself to our mission, read on.

The team is motivated by the positive vision of how Cognitive AI can foster human flourishing, the challenge of solving difficult novel problems, and the rewards that come from building something truly transformative.

Financial compensation of this core team leans more towards meaningful stock options than maximizing cash. Think early Google or SpaceX, employee #15.

The Role

AI Psychologist is a profession invented by Aigo’s chief scientist. About half our team holds this role.

We teach our system the way a child learns: through grounded examples, carefully sequenced curricula, and continuous probing of what it does and doesn’t understand. The system is progressing through cognitive stages from toddler to child to teenager, and we are iterating rapidly toward adult-level intelligence. Your job is to help design and execute that journey.This isn't instructional design for human learners. There's no courseware, no LMS, no training modules. You'd be working out how a system that starts from nothing comes to understand a concept at all.

This is not an engineering role. It sits at the intersection of language, cognition, and AI development. You will work closely with the engineering team in tight iteration cycles. Prior AI experience is not required, but you must be fascinated by the nature of intelligence, deeply comfortable with language, cognition, and how people learn, and rigorous enough to design tests that reveal what a system truly understands versus what it merely appears to understand.

What You’ll Work On

• Designing and building curricula tailored to the AI’s specific cognitive needs at each stage of development, from early language acquisition through abstract reasoning and theory of mind
• Figuring out how the system could learn something cognitively rather than by hardcoded rule, and what prerequisites it needs to get there
• Identifying and co-developing new cognitive skills required to expand the system’s capabilities
• Creating question/answer sets, comprehension exercises, and structured conversations that challenge and expand the system’s current capabilities
• Identifying gaps and failure modes, then working with engineers to address them in rapid iteration cycles
• Independent research and brainstorming to develop new approaches to curriculum design and capability evaluation
• Evaluating natural language understanding across a wide range of domains, reasoning types, and cognitive tasks
• Designing knowledge ontologies to bolster the system’s fundamental understanding

Requirements

• Background in education, cognitive science, linguistics, or a related field, with an emphasis on education
• Deep fascination with the nature of intelligence, language, and how minds (human or artificial) actually work
• Strong command of English and exceptional analytical and writing skills
• Ability to think rigorously and independently, designing tests and curricula from first principles rather than templates
• Comfortable working closely with engineers and iterating quickly in a fast-moving development environment
• Comfortable in a technical environment. You'll spend real time in the system's logs and working out why it did what it did, forming hypotheses about which mechanism failed, and building reproducible cases for engineers. It isn't coding, but it isn't non-technical either.
• Familiarity with current AI systems including LLMs is a plus; understanding their capabilities and limitations firsthand is directly relevant
• Multilingual ability is a plus

What’s Not Required:

Prior AI/ML or software engineering experience. You'll work closely with engineers, but you own the cognitive side: the spec, the tests, the evaluation. Not the code.