Head of Applied AI Research & RL

Raydar; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 500,000 - 750,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Hybrid work

Job summary

Raydar is seeking a Head of Research to set the research roadmap and grow an applied research team while remaining hands-on with frontier AI problems. You will work directly with customer research teams and shape how environments, data and trajectories contribute to model capability.

In this role you will run hands-on experiments, hire and grow the team (at least four researchers), and partner with engineering, delivery and go-to-market to deploy research into production.

Qualifications

• 8+ years as a research scientist or applied researcher.
• Experience leading frontier AI labs or research teams.
• A notable published paper or released model with strong benchmark results.
• Hands-on expertise in real applied reinforcement learning model training.
• Ability to set research direction, lead efforts and recruit while remaining hands-on.

Responsibilities

• Set research priorities and own the applied research roadmap.
• Hire and grow the research team (at least four researchers).
• Collaborate with customer labs on reinforcement learning and post-training problems.
• Run hands-on experiments and improve environments, datasets and trajectories.
• Partner with engineering, delivery and go-to-market to productionize research.

Skills

Applied reinforcement learning

Team leadership

Research roadmap

Hands-on experimentation

Recruitment

Education

PhD in reinforcement learning or NLP

Tools

Qwen 2.5

Job description

Raydar is seeking a Head of Research to set the research roadmap and grow an applied research team while remaining hands-on with frontier AI problems. You will work directly with customer research teams and shape how environments, data and trajectories contribute to model capability.

In this role you will run hands-on experiments, hire and grow the team (at least four researchers), and partner with engineering, delivery and go-to-market to deploy research into production.