Member of Technical Staff, Research

FirstPrinciples is a non-profit organization building an autonomous AI Physicist to understand the nature of reality. They are seeking a Member of Technical Staff, Research to investigate and develop state of the art methods for their AI engine, collaborating with cross-functional teams to advance scientific research.

Responsibilities:

• Research, design, and test novel, research‑specific model architectures that integrate academic literature, natural language processing (NLP), symbolic reasoning, and other methods to orchestrate the scientific process
• Prototype and build custom tokenizers for LaTeX symbols and physical units to be treated as tokens
• Explore alternatives to transformers through in-depth research and provide practical recommendations for model development
• Develop reinforcement-learning loops to enable models to run independent and internal thought experiments
• Design and automate data ingestion pipelines in collaboration with our Data Scientists & Engineers that aggregates science literature, metadata, experimental data, equations and other data sources in a robust and scalable manner
• Establish custom benchmarks to assess the models’ understanding of physical concepts, mathematical reasoning abilities, and ability to minimize hallucinations for the benefit of scientific reliability
• Refine and release datasets and baselines once internal tests are stable
• Run and track model training jobs while leading the technical team through set-up, monitoring progress, and constraining costs within budget
• Develop approaches to stage 'practice runs' in a sandbox environment to develop the model’s abilities to explore ideas independently while logging results for later review
• Develop a framework to evaluate the models’ learning using visual and statistical tools to spot patterns and blind spots
• Add guard-rails and tests that flag poor quality model output
• Maintain internal tools to track lists of known issues, noting failures, clear fixes, and improvements to be integrated into future development
• Work with the engineering team to ensure product feasibility and robust architecture
• Translate technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders in clear terms
• Present findings in clear updates to the technical team in order to keep the broader team appraised of progress against research milestones