Research Scientist

Simular; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Simular is seeking a Research Scientist to push the boundaries of AI research across planning, reinforcement learning, and multimodal reasoning. You will drive end-to-end experiments, from data collection to model evaluation, and collaborate with engineers to bring research prototypes into production.

The role emphasizes publishing results at leading conferences and advancing methods through dataset construction and benchmarking against state-of-the-art models, with a strong focus on real-world

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent research experience in ML or related field.
• Proven ability to lead and execute a research program from ideation to publication.
• Strong track record of first-author publications in top venues.

Responsibilities

• Shape the future of agentic AI by pioneering new research directions in planning, RL, multimodal reasoning, grounding, human-agent interaction, and alignment.
• Design and execute end-to-end experiments from data collection to model evaluation.
• Develop new methodologies advancing AI agent capabilities for academic and product impact.
• Collaborate with engineers to integrate research prototypes into products.
• Publish and present results at top-tier conferences and contribute to the AI research community.
• Advance hands-on science by designing methods, building datasets, running experiments, and benchmarking against state of the art.

Skills

Planning

Reinforcement learning

Multimodal learning

Computer vision

Representation learning

Experimentation

Publication leadership

Education

PhD in Computer Science or ML

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

Where multiple locations are listed for this role, the position may be based in any of those locations, with priority determined according to the order of listing.

What you’ll do

As a Research Scientist at Simular, you will:

• Shape the future of agentic AI by pioneering new research directions in planning, reinforcement learning, multimodal reasoning, grounding, human-agent interaction, and alignment (e.g. reward modeling, automated task evaluation, AI safety).

• Design and execute experiments end-to-end: from data collection and benchmarking, to model training and evaluation.

• Develop new methodologies that push the boundaries of AI agent capabilities and reliabilities, advancing both academic and product impacts, in collaboration with world-class scientists and engineers.

• Collaborate closely with engineers to integrate research prototypes into product

• Publish and present results at top-tier conferences, contributing to the broader AI research community.

• Advance the science hands-on through designing methods, building datasets, running experiments, and benchmarking against state of the art.

You might be a fit if

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field, or equivalent research experience.

• Experience owning the complete research lifestyle: leading and executing a research program from ideation all the way to publication.

• Expertise in one or more of (but not limited to) the following areas:

  • Pre-training, post-training, or fine-tuning LLMs/VLMs

  • Reinforcement learning and/or LLM-based agents

  • Computer vision and multimodal learning

  • Representation learning and embeddings.

• Consistent publication record as first author in leading conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ACL, etc.).

• Strong implementation skills in modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, etc.).

• Demonstrated ability to run complex experiments, analyze results, and iterate quickly.

• Passion for high-impact research with real-world applications.

• Ambition and vision to redefine what’s possible in AI research and deployment.