Forward Deployed Scientist

EdgeRunner AI, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision coverage

Remote-first culture

401K

Unlimited PTO

IT stipend

Job summary

EdgeRunner AI seeks a field-ready Research role to engage with customers, prototype solutions, and advance world-class AI for the warfighter. You will travel to customer sites, train models, evaluate AI systems, and collaborate with engineering and business teams to deliver capabilities in dynamic environments.

Preferred candidates have PhD-level experience or equivalent research background, with a track record in RL, data ablations, and multimodal AI.

Qualifications

• Experience with experimentation in RL and large-scale AI training domains.
• Experience across data ablations, pretraining, and multimodal modeling is valued.
• Ability to translate business objectives into technical solutions and engage with customers.

Responsibilities

• Represent EdgeRunner Research in the field for customer engagements and projects.
• Travel on-site to meet with customers for prototyping, scoping, and implementation of new solutions.
• Train models, evaluate AI systems and harnesses, and bring world-class AI to the warfighter.

Skills

Reinforcement learning

Data ablations

Pretraining/Midtraining

Vision & multimodal training

Machine translation

Training data development

Benchmark development

Inference optimization

Agentic harness development

Robotics integration of LLMs

Education

PhD preferred

Job description

About Us

Our mission is to bring state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to the tactical edge, enabling the American warfighter to make better decisions faster, to synthesize and understand diverse streams of data, and to work directly with robotic platforms using natural language. We’re researchers, and we perform the full stack of model training, conducting thousands of experiments in order to improve our models. We’re also machine learning engineers, and we bring productized AI directly to the end user.

By placing AI models at the tactical edge, the warfighter is empowered with the world’s best AI, even in the most harsh and extreme conditions. Moreover, interactions with the EdgeRunner system are secure by nature, because the data never needs to leave the device. Whether it’s on a laptop, a TAK device, a robotic platform, or in a field-forward location, we achieve frontier-level task performance by specializing each model for the warfighter’s MOS/AFSC and platform-specific needs and by performing aggressive and proprietary quantization, distillation, and compression.

Our passion is to build nothing short of the world’s best AI for the edge.

About the Role

In this role, you will represent the EdgeRunner Research organization in the field for key customer engagements and projects. You will work closely with the core EdgeRunner Research, engineering, and business development teams, directly supporting customers critical to our national security. You will travel to meet with customers on-site for prototyping, scoping, and implementing new solutions. You will train models, evaluate AI systems and harnesses, and bring world-class AI to the warfighter.

Strong candidates will have experience performing experimentation in one or more of the following areas:

• Reinforcement learning;
• Large-scale data ablations;
• Pretraining and midtraining;
• Vision model training and multimodal training;
• Machine translation and multilingual modeling;
• Training data development;
• Benchmark development;
• Inference optimization;
• Agentic harness development;
• Robotic integration of LLMs; and
• Blind model adaptation by end users

Candidates must be eligible to receive a TS/SCI clearance, and strong candidates will have an active clearance. Under federal law, U.S. citizenship is required to obtain a security clearance.

A PhD in a relevant field is preferred, but we will also consider relevant research experience from time in industry, military, or government.

Travel required up to 25% of time to meet with customers and deliver capabilities.

EdgeRunner AI is a Series-A startup, and we move quickly. Preference will be given to candidates who have a track record of taking the initiative, who can understand how business objectives translate into technical solutions, who can interact with customers, and who are comfortable with ambiguity. Though we work as a team, every researcher is a self-starter, a project owner, and can operate independently when needed.

We offer competitive salary, equity, and benefits, with individual pay determined by experience, relevant education, and/or training. Benefits include:

• 100% covered health, dental, and vision for employees; 50% for dependants
• 100% remote first culture; you can work from anywhere in the US full-time
• 401K program
• Unlimited PTO
• IT stipend for purchasing new equipment

EdgeRunner AI is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.