Head of Research

OpenKrill; United States; Remote; USD 250,000 - 380,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible time off

Health coverage

Extended parental leave

Meaningful equity

Job summary

Avra is seeking a senior leader to make its relational foundation model the best in the world and to build the team that maintains that position. You will oversee the research portfolio, hire and mentor researchers, and drive the experiment cadence and governance across cross-functional teams.

You will stay hands-on with code and experiments, guiding pretraining, evaluation, and deployment while communicating commitments and evidence to executives, risk, and commercial teams.

Qualifications

• You've led a research or applied ML team whose models ran in production and moved a real metric.
• Deep technical credibility in modern deep learning, especially transformers, pretraining, and in-context learning.
• Portfolio judgment: you know when to scale a promising idea and when to kill it, and you've done both.
• You've hired and grown researchers who went on to do the best work of their careers.
• Operating rigor: reproducibility, evaluation protocols, and compute budgets.
• Clear written and spoken English.

Responsibilities

• The portfolio. Define and own the research program for this cycle with the Chief Scientist, accountable for outcomes.
• The team. Hire, develop, and retain researchers and make Avra a magnet for top talent.
• The cadence. Set hypotheses, reviews, and experiment ladders with a governance framework and compute budgets.
• The interfaces. Ensure research outputs and evidence are delivered to ML Systems for governed releases with data teams.
• The commitments. Communicate model promises to customers and risk teams with clear evidence.

Skills

Deep learning

Transformers

Research leadership

Portfolio judgment

English communication

Hiring and team building

Reproducibility

Education

PhD in ML or related field

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

ABOUT AVRA

Foundation models learned to read text, images, and code. The data that runs the economy hasn't had its moment yet. It lives in relational databases: customers, accounts, transactions, and claims, linked by keys and moving through time. Every credit approval, fraud block, and retention offer is a prediction over that data. Today each one is still a bespoke model, rebuilt by hand for every task, schema, and company.

We're building a foundation model for relational data: one model that reads any database, understands its schema from the names of its tables and columns, and learns a new task from labeled examples in its context, the way language models learned to follow a prompt.

Avra exists to build that model and the platform that turns its predictions into decisions running in production, in our cloud or inside an enterprise's own infrastructure. We're an AI research lab with our home in São Paulo, backed by Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, and we ship with enterprise design partners in banking, payments, telecom, and commerce, including Mercado Livre, Inter, PicPay, Banco BV, and Vivo.

ABOUT THE TEAM

We are a small group of researchers, engineers, and company builders, with our home in São Paulo and a team spread across San Francisco, Latin America, and Europe. Research is a team of Members of Technical Staff working on one portfolio: pretraining, in-context learning, data, and evaluation for our relational foundation model. Research leadership is shared between two peers. Our Chief Scientist owns scientific direction and the standard of evidence. The Head of Research owns whether the team delivers.

Our researchers have published widely at venues like NeurIPS and ICLR. You can find our work on our research page https://avra.ai/research.

YOUR MISSION

Make Avra's relational foundation model the best in the world, and build the team that keeps it there.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

• The portfolio. What Research works on this cycle, what it stops, and who owns each initiative. You set this together with the Chief Scientist and are accountable for the outcome.
• The team. Hiring, developing, and allocating researchers, and making Avra the place where the best researchers in relational and tabular ML want to work.
• The cadence. Written hypotheses, research reviews, decision records, and an experiment ladder that runs small and cheap before it scales. Plus a compute budget that's spent on purpose.
• The interfaces. Research hands candidate models and their evidence to ML Systems for governed release. It works with our data teams on pretraining corpora and supports Forward Deployment when a customer's model needs adapting. You make those contracts explicit and keep them working.
• The commitments. What our models can promise a customer, by when, and on what evidence. You'll explain this clearly to executives, to customers' risk teams, and to our own commercial team.
• You'll stay hands-on: reading code, running experiments, and going into the details of a training curve when something looks wrong.

WHAT WE HOPE YOU'LL BRING

• You’ve led a research or applied ML team whose models ran in production and moved a real metric
• Deep technical credibility in modern deep learning, especially transformers, pretraining, and in-context learning
• Portfolio judgment: you know when to scale a promising idea and when to kill it, and you've done both
• You’ve hired and grown researchers who went on to do the best work of their careers
• Operating rigor: reproducibility, evaluation protocols, and compute budgets
• Clear written and spoken English

BONUS POINTS IF YOU HAVE

• Pretrained foundation models at scale
• Worked on tabular or relational foundation models, in-context learning, or meta-learning
• Built models for credit, fraud, or other regulated decisions
• Portuguese, since our design partners are in Brazil
• A record of research or open-source work that other researchers build on

HOW WE INTERVIEW

1. Intro call with the CTO (45 min). Your path, and what you'd want this role to be.
2. Deep dive (60 min). A team or research program you led: the bets, the results, and the calls you'd make differently.
3. Portfolio exercise (90 min). We share context on where the model is today. You come back with a written plan for the next two quarters and walk the CTO and Chief Scientist through it.
4. Research team (60 min). A session with the researchers you'd lead, without the founders in the room.
5. Founders (45 min).
6. References.

LOGISTICS

• Location: Remote. We hire in most countries through Deel. The team works across San Francisco, Brazil, Uruguay, and Europe, and we get together in person regularly, in São Paulo and elsewhere.
• Compensation: Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
• Compute: A compute and research budget that you'll own.
• Benefits: Flexible time off, health coverage, and extended parental leave.