Member of Technical Staff – Founding AI Researcher

Twenty Labs; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive Medical/Dental/Vision insurance

401(k) plan with 4% match

Catered daily team lunch

Free parking

Time off as needed

Top-quality computers and ergonomic workspace

Corporate AI subscriptions

Job summary

A leading research lab in AI seeks a Founding AI Researcher to innovate in financial analysis using AI. Ideal candidates will demonstrate a strong research background, coding excellence, and creativity in problem-solving. This position offers a base salary of $150,000 - $300,000 along with top-market equity and the opportunity to work closely with industry pioneers in a collaborative environment.

Qualifications

• Proven track record of impactful research or potential for exceptional research.
• Strong coding skills are crucial.
• Ability to validate ideas quickly with experimental rigor.

Responsibilities

• Innovate on applying AI to knowledge work in collaboration with founding team.
• Improve performance of agents on financial analysis tasks.
• Work on techniques like prompt/context engineering and fine-tuning.

Skills

Research impact through high-quality publications

Creative problem-solving

End-to-end detail-oriented in ML pipeline

Coding proficiency

Familiarity with large-scale model training infrastructure

Job description

Twenty Labs is an applied research lab working on augmenting knowledge workers, starting with finance. The penetration of AI in finance is still limited and we want to be the company that delivers AGI to finance through our product, Compound (@getcompoundai ). Some product videos can be found on YouTube .

You’ll be joining a highly technical founding team, including leading researchers and engineers from Google DeepMind/Brain and Microsoft who pioneered research in language models, shipped GenAI products to billions in production, paired with domain expertise from top finance and consulting firms (Coatue, Bain, Y Combinator).

• Comprehensive Medical/Dental/Vision insurance for you and dependents, including $0 premium plan with company HSA contribution
• 401(k) plan with 4% match
• Catered daily team lunch
• Urban downtown San Mateo office, 5-minute walk from Caltrain and free parking
• Time off as you need it
• Top-quality computers and ergonomic workspace
• Corporate AI subscriptions as much as you need for work

Our culture and how we operate

• We seek out the 10% of people who account for 90% of productivity and strive to be a small and talent-dense team.
• No formal performance reviews. If you’re here, you’re a high-performer.
• Our organization is flat with no middle managers and you will work directly with the founders who all code.
• No empire building – we operate as one team.
• If you see something you can fix efficiently end-to-end, just do it.
• We love being in-person at our San Mateo office 5-days a week for maximum bandwidth communication and enjoying delicious local food together.
• We write blameless post-mortems (incident reports) for any service outages to document and constantly improve reliability.
• We “Feel the AGI” and want to bring it to others to massively improve productivity.

Work Authorization

We prefer candidates who can start immediately, but can provide immigration assistance for exceptional cases.

Member of Technical Staff – Founding AI Researcher

Compensation: Base salary of $150,000 - $300,000. Top-of-market equity
Location: San Mateo, CA

Your role

We’re seeking researchers with demonstrated research track record or have clear potential to excel at research (like AI residents) to innovate on the bleeding edge of applying AI to knowledge work. You’ll work directly with founders to improve the performance of agents on financial analysis tasks through a variety of techniques, which may include prompt/context engineering, continued pre‑training or post‑training (fine‑tuning + RL).

You, the ideal candidate:

• Have demonstrated either research impact through high‑quality publications or experience at top‑tier research labs, or exceptional research potential
• Codes as well as the best engineers, which is important to be a top researcher
• Is creative in coming up with contrarian ideas and validates/rejects them quickly with experimental rigor
• End‑to‑end detail‑oriented, understanding the whole ML pipeline from data provenance to training and model evaluation
• Knows how to manipulate tensors, not just configs
• Familiar with large‑scale model training infrastructure
• Can assess when fine‑tuning makes sense vs prompting/context‑engineering