Founding Research Scientist, Applied AI

Agentio; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Comprehensive Health Coverage

Dental & Vision Plans

401(k) Retirement Plan

Lifestyle credit

Job summary

Agentio is seeking a researcher to advance AI-native advertising infrastructure. You will tackle multimodal intelligence, ranking and prediction, and foundation models to improve campaign strategies and creator-brand matching.

You will prototype ideas, work with large datasets, and collaborate with engineers to productionize successful methods, shaping the research direction of a first-of-its-kind platform.

Qualifications

• PhD required with original ML research demonstrated via publications or equivalent.
• Depth in foundation models, multimodal learning, ranking, or related areas.
• Experience applying research to real products and production systems.
• Strong hands-on implementation skills with large datasets and modern ML stacks.

Responsibilities

• Own research problems from formulation to experimentation and product application.
• Design rigorous experiments and evaluations; develop new methods and prove impact on product outcomes.
• Develop models, algorithms, datasets, and evaluation methods; collaborate with engineering to productionize.
• Help define Agentio's research agenda and maintain high experimental rigor.

Skills

PhD in ML/AI/CS/Statistics

Foundation models

Multimodal learning

Recommendation & ranking

Representation learning

Reinforcement learning

Causal inference

Optimization

Prototype & productionization

Research-to-product translation

Education

PhD in machine learning, AI, CS, or statistics

Job description

About Agentio

Agentio builds AI-native infrastructure for creator advertising. Our platform uses AI to turn creative and performance signals into campaign strategies, match brands with creators, recommend sponsorship prices, and review videos against brand requirements.

Each campaign generates feedback: how brands respond to our recommendations, which offers creators accept, and how the resulting content performs. We build self improving loops that learn from these behaviours and outcomes to better understand preferences, predict performance, and improve campaign decisions.

The work sits between research and product. You'll formulate research problems from product needs, test and extend methods from academia and industry, develop new approaches when existing methods fall short, and work with engineering and product to translate successful research into production systems.

What You'll Work On

Multimodal intelligence. Build systems that understand creators, brands, briefs, and content across video, audio, image, and text.

Ranking, recommendation, and prediction. Develop models that predict creator-brand fit and campaign outcomes and make better decisions from sparse, heterogeneous feedback.

Foundation models and agents. Apply LLMs and multimodal models to campaign planning, discovery, creative understanding, execution, and optimization. Use Agentio's proprietary data for prompting, retrieval, fine-tuning, post-training, and, where it makes sense, specialized model training.

Learning and decision-making. Turn campaign data into training signals, evals, and learning loops while tackling problems in optimization, exploration, measurement, and marketplace dynamics.

Part of the role is deciding which advances in AI and ML are useful for Agentio and where new methods are needed.

What You'll Do

• Own research problems from problem formulation through experimentation, validation, and product application.
• Design rigorous experiments and evaluations, develop new methods where needed, and establish evidence that research advances improve product and marketplace outcomes.
• Develop models, algorithms, training approaches, datasets, and evaluation methods when existing techniques are insufficient. Partner with engineering to turn successful research into reliable product capabilities.
• Help define Agentio's research agenda, identify high-value research questions, and set a high bar for experimental rigor across applied ML work.

Who We're Looking For

We're looking for a researcher with strong technical depth who wants their work to change a production product, not stop at a paper or prototype.

• PhD in machine learning, AI, computer science, statistics, or a related field, with a track record of original ML research demonstrated through peer-reviewed publications or comparable research contributions.
• Depth in one or more areas such as foundation models, multimodal learning, recommendation and ranking, representation learning, reinforcement learning and decision-making, causal inference, optimization, or adjacent fields.
• Experience applying research to real products or production systems, including turning ambiguous product problems into research questions and translating successful results into measurable product improvements.
• Strong implementation skills: you can prototype your own ideas, work directly with large datasets and modern ML stacks, and collaborate closely with engineers on productionization.
• Strong knowledge of current AI research and the judgment to distinguish technically interesting work from approaches that will matter in practice.

What You'll Get

• The opportunity to build the research function at a first-of-its kind business and make a meaningful impact in the way brands share their stories and creators live off their work.
• Crash-course in what it takes to scale a start-up with first-hand exposure to the different foundational business drivers and needs.
• The chance to work with an exceptional team and help build our engineering culture
• A collaborative, transparent, and engaging work environment.

Benefits & Perks

• Flexible PTO – Take the time you need to recharge
• Comprehensive Health Coverage – Top medical plan through Aetna
• Dental & Vision Plans – Protect your smile and your sight with coverage from Guardian
• 401(k) Retirement Plan – Invest in your future while you build your career
• $100 Monthly Lifestyle Credit – Use it to shop with our amazing Agentio Brand Partners
• Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best
• Dinner provided Monday - Thursday
• Fully subsidized gold tier access on Wellhub (Includes LifeTime, Barry's, Solidcore, Headspace, etc)
• Gym in the building! – Your workout, right downstairs

Agentio is an equal-opportunity employer. All aspects of employment will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.