NeoCognition - Member of Technical Staff – Research

deCircle; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 280,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation support

On-site in Palo Alto

Job summary

NeoCognition in Palo Alto is seeking a Member of Technical Staff [Research] to lead end-to-end research projects advancing LLM reasoning and agentic systems, from concept to prototypes, in collaboration with engineers and designers.

You'll drive experiments, benchmark models, and publish or open-source where appropriate, with relocation support for exceptional candidates; on-site 5 days/week in Palo Alto. Visa sponsorship available for strong applicants.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of LLM research with publications.
• Hands-on experience with post-training, RLHF and open-weight models.
• Proficiency in Python; experience with PyTorch/JAX or TensorFlow.
• On-site role with relocation support in Palo Alto.

Responsibilities

• Lead research initiatives in LLM reasoning, post-training, and agentic system design.
• Develop methods to improve capability, reliability, and safety of autonomous LLM agents.
• Collaborate with software engineers to prototyp e and productionize research.
• Design experiments, benchmark performance, and analyze model behaviors.
• Stay abreast of multi-agent systems, RLHF, and open-weight models; contribute to publications.
• Help shape the research culture and technical roadmap as an early team member.

Skills

LLM research

Post-training

RLHF

Python

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

Open-weight models

Tools

Open-weight models

Job description

Source: Paraform - https://www.paraform.com/share/neocognition/cmpejiwh000020cjykwkd1wy3

Compensation: $280,000-$350,000 base + competitive equity (likely 0.05%-0.5%).

Location: Palo Alto, CA - on-site 5 days/week; relocation supported; fully remote only for truly exceptional candidates. Visa: open to transfers and most visas; sponsorship for strong candidates willing to relocate.

About this role

As a Member of Technical Staff [Research] at NeoCognition, you'll be part of the core team advancing the frontier of LLM agents: systems that can reason, plan, and act reliably in the real world. You'll lead end-to-end research projects, from conceptualization and experimentation to building and testing product prototypes, working closely with engineers and designers.

Responsibilities

• Lead research initiatives in LLM reasoning, post-training, and agentic system design

• Develop new methods to improve capability, reliability, and safety of autonomous LLM agents in real-world environments

• Collaborate with software and platform engineers to prototype and productionize research outcomes into sticky product experiences

• Design and execute experiments, benchmark performance, and analyze model behaviors to identify failure modes and opportunities

• Stay abreast of reasoning, multi-agent systems, RLHF, tool use and LLM fine-tuning; contribute to publications or open source where appropriate

• Help shape the research culture and technical roadmap as an early team member

Tech stack

Python, PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, LLMs, RLHF, Llama, Mistral, Open-weight models, Post-training, Agentic system design, Multi-agent systems, AI coding tools

About NeoCognition

AI agent lab for specialized intelligence, developing AI agents that continuously learn to reach expert-level intelligence. Founding team's research is used in frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others. 10 employees, founded 2025, $40M total funding, Palo Alto.

• 2+ years of LLM research (agents, post-training, or evaluations) with publications

• Hands-on with post-training (instruction tuning, RL, reasoning), RLHF and open-weight models

• Python; PyTorch, JAX or TensorFlow

• On-site 5 days/week in Palo Alto (relocation supported)