Senior AI Researcher

Icehouseventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Equity ownership

Relocation & Visa support

Health insurance

401(k) program

Unlimited PTO

Commuter benefits

Office in SF with amenities

Job summary

Ivo in San Francisco is seeking a Ph.D.-level AI researcher to advance state-of-the-art in LLMs and deep learning for high-stakes legal applications. You’ll drive research from problem framing through production, emphasizing trustworthy models, grounded generation, and robust evaluation.

Join a fast-moving startup environment with direct impact on product features and customer outcomes. In-person collaboration is required at the SF office, with relocation and visa support where applicable.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. or equivalent industry research experience.
• Demonstrated impact through papers, shipped systems, or notable results.
• Strong experience with modern DL frameworks and large language models.

Responsibilities

• Own the research roadmap end-to-end for Ivo's platform.
• Design, prototype, and ship winner approaches into production with engineering.
• Build evaluation datasets, benchmarks, and metrics for legal text.
• Communicate findings to technical and non-technical audiences.

Skills

LLMs

Deep learning

Research

DL frameworks

Communication

Education

Ph.D. in CS/Engineering/Math/Physics or equivalent

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

TensorFlow

Open-source

Job description

Why Join Ivo?

Every civilization runs on the same infrastructure: agreements between people who don't fully trust each other. Sumerians pressed them into clay. Romans carved them into stone. We bury them in 80-page PDFs.

The way those agreements are reviewed hasn't changed in four thousand years - a human reads the whole thing and tries not to miss anything. We're building the AI that finally changes that. Ivo is the contract intelligence platform of choice for companies like Uber, Meta, Canva, IBM, and Shopify. We recently raised our Series B and have grown 800% over the last 12 months.

Engineering at Ivo

Engineers At Ivo Are Inventors. Ivo Was First-to-market With

• An AI agent that lives in MS Word and edits the document for you [2023]
• Ditching imprecise embeddings models in favor of agentic RAG [2023]
• Large-scale LLM-based legal fact extraction [2024]
• A legal assistant that can search large contract databases without sacrificing accuracy [2024]
• Clustering legal documents descended from the same family [2025]
• Automatic deviation analysis to locate buried risk in huge contract databases [2025]
• Merging contracts with their amendments to produce a time series of "composite" contracts (a customer actually cried when we showed her this) [2025]

The Role: Why, What, and Who

Why

AI Researchers are the engine of innovation at Ivo. You'll push the state of the art in applying LLMs, deep learning, and advanced AI techniques to the unique and high-stakes challenges of the legal domain — where accuracy, explainability, and robustness aren't nice-to-haves, they're the product. Your research will translate directly into features that redefine how legal professionals work.

This isn't an academic role. It's a chance to see your research fundamentally change an industry.

What You'll Do

You’ll own a research roadmap end-to-end: identifying the right problems, designing experiments, prototyping, and shipping the winners into production alongside the engineering team. Concretely, that looks like:

• Advance the core AI platform. Design and implement novel approaches to the problems at the heart of Ivo's product: reasoning over long-context legal corpora, contract comparison and redlining, information extraction, and automated drafting and editing.
• Make our models trustworthy. Conduct research on procedural hallucination detection and resolution, calibration, and explainability. In a domain where a single fabricated citation can sink a deal, the bar for groundedness is uncompromising — your job is to keep raising it. Push frontier techniques into production. Explore and apply advanced fine-tuning, PEFT, and distillation techniques to make our models faster, cheaper, and more accurate on legal- specific tasks. Evaluate emerging work in agentic systems, long-context modeling, and reasoning, and figure out which ideas actually move the needle for our customers.
• Build the evaluation infrastructure. Design and maintain datasets, benchmarks, and evals for training and measuring model performance on complex legal text. Define the metrics that matter, and hold the team to them.
• Ship. Partner closely with Engineering and Product to take prototypes from notebook to production, write internal reports that influence the technical direction of the platform, and present findings to both technical and non-technical audiences across the company.

Who you are

Required

• A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related quantitative field — or equivalent industry research experience with a comparable track record.
• Evidence of exceptional ability — a paper, shipped system, open-source contribution, competition result, or hard problem you cracked that puts you meaningfully ahead of your peers.
• Deep, hands-on experience in deep learning research and development, particularly with LLMs. Strong working knowledge of modern frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow) and the surrounding open-source ecosystem.
• Expertise in at least one of: agentic systems, reasoning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, quantization, inference optimization (e.g., speculative decoding), hallucination mitigation, novel architectures in deep learning, or robust evaluation methodology for LLMs.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex research findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A bias toward action: you ship rather than perfect, you measure rather than guess, and you'd rather have a working prototype today than a polished plan next week.

Nice To Have

• Publications at top venues — e.g., ML/AI conferences (NeurIPS, AAAI, ICML, ICLR), or peer-reviewed journals in adjacent quantitative fields (Journal of Computational Physics, SIAM journals, Journal of the ACM, Nature, Science, PNAS) — or equivalent strong research contributions in industry.
• Experience with long-context modeling, retrieval, or grounded generation in high-stakes domains (legal, medical, financial).
• Prior work on hallucination detection, calibration, or interpretability.
• A track record of building from zero in fast-paced startup or research environments.

You'll Thrive At Ivo If

• You love writing code, but you love impact more. We're a team of engineers at heart, but our #1 goal is the best possible product. That means making pragmatic choices and looking for 80/20 solutions over the elegant 100% answer.
• You're relentlessly resourceful. When the path isn't clear, you find one. When the tool doesn't exist, you build it.
• You have a strong internal sense of urgency. You'd rather do it today than tomorrow.
• You're excited by the adventure of building a company. Startup experience is preferred, but not required — the disposition matters more than the resume line.

What We Offer

• Competitive Compensation: Final offer details are determined based on experience, expertise, and overall fit.
• Equity: Meaningful ownership in a company that's scaling fast
• Relocation and Visa Support: We also offer relocation assistance for successful applicants moving to SF, as well as support for visa and green card applications where applicable.
• Health & Wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans to suit the needs of you and your family.
• Flexible Spending & Insurance: Access to HSA and FSA accounts, plus life insurance coverage.
• 401(k) Program: Save for the future with our 401(k) program.
• Commuter Benefits: We help make getting to and from the office easier and more convenient.
• Unlimited PTO: So you can take the time you need to recharge, stay healthy, and bring your best self to work.
• Office Perks: Enjoy a vibrant Downtown San Francisco office with catered lunch five days a week, premium snacks and coffee, an in-building gym, and a dog-friendly environment.

FAQ

• What stage of growth is Ivo at?: We launched in early access in 2023. Since then, we’ve had an incredible response from the market and are growing rapidly. We 6x'd in ARR in the last 12 months. Our clients include companies like Uber, Reddit, IBM, Canva, Pinterest, WordPress, and more. We're happy to share more details with candidates who go through our interview process.
• Is this a chill gig?: Startups are very hard, especially if they’re growing fast. You’ll have a ton of responsibility, and there’s always an enormous amount of stuff to do. It’s hard work but the payoff is uncapped.
• Can I work remotely?: We require candidates to work with us in-person 5 days a week in our San Francisco office.

Ivo is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Compensation Range: $200K - $325K