Member of Technical Staff, Research

a16z-speedrun; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision

Paid time off

Vacation

Job summary

Primitive Labs is seeking a research-focused individual to build the research systems behind behavioral intelligence agents. You will work across simulation architectures, memory systems, cognitive science, continual learning, and agent architectures to improve how agents model human behavior, make decisions, and act within real product experiences.

You will contribute to papers, technical writing, open-source work, and conference talks while helping define our research program.

Qualifications

• Led research in agents, ML, simulation, or cognitive science.
• Design rigorous experiments.
• Build the systems needed to test your ideas.
• Work deeply with large models and agents.
• Turn research into production systems.
• Care about human behavior, not just task completion.

Responsibilities

• Own research directions from question to production.
• Design experiments for agent behavior.
• Build simulations of real user decision-making.
• Develop behavioral-fidelity benchmarks.
• Train and evaluate agents against human data.
• Translate research findings into model, memory, and runtime improvements.
• Publish papers, technical write-ups, and open-source work.

Skills

Research leadership in agents, ML, or.

Experiment design

Systems building

Working with large models

Productionizing research

Human behavior focus

Job description

At Primitive Labs our mission is to make human behavior a first-class primitive of software development.

In this role, you will build the research systems behind our behavioral intelligence agents. Your work will span simulation architectures, memory systems, computational cognitive science, continual learning, and agent architectures. The goal is to improve how agents model human behavior, make decisions, and act across real product experiences. You will also help define our research program through papers, technical writing, open-source work, and conference talks.

Responsibilities

• Own research directions from question to production.

• Design experiments for agent behavior.

• Build simulations of real user decision-making.

• Develop behavioral-fidelity benchmarks.

• Train and evaluate agents against human data.

• Translate research findings into model, memory, and runtime improvements.

• Publish papers, technical write-ups, and open-source work.

Qualifications

• Led research in agents, ML, simulation, or cognitive science.

• Design rigorous experiments.

• Build the systems needed to test your ideas.

• Work deeply with large models and agents.

• Turn research into production systems.

• Care about human behavior, not just task completion.

Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, plus paid time off and vacation.

We hire for potential, and we base compensation on what we believe you can achieve rather than years of experience or a list of skills.

About Primitive Labs

Primitive Labs is building AI systems that are human-aligned. As machines make more of the decisions that shape our lives, we are working to keep people at the center of them. Our founding team comes from Amazon Artificial General Intelligence and AWS. We are backed by top-tier venture firms and investors, and our advisors are researchers and operators with backgrounds from OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and many other leading organizations. Check out our launch blog to learn more.

Everyone at Primitive Labs is a builder. Our whole team pushes code and contributes to research. The best work, in our experience, comes from a few people trusted with real ownership and left to do it well, with no layers in between. We move quickly and speak honestly. We hold that every belief can be challenged, especially our own. We want people who are deeply passionate about their work and have a virtually unlimited intellectual curiosity. If you believe in building AI systems that are human-aligned and genuinely love solving hard problems, we would love to talk.

Primitive Labs AI Inc. is an equal opportunity employer.