VP of Research, Machine Learning

About the Company

A1 is building a proactive smart assistant for everyday users to bring intelligence to conversations, errands, organizing, and workflows. The mission is to create high-reliability systems capable of multi-step reasoning and real-world task completion for billions of users.

Responsibilities

• Set and evolve the research direction for core intelligence, including context representation, memory, reasoning, planning, and orchestration
• Decide between designing new model architectures versus leveraging frontier open-source or commercial models
• Define evaluation frameworks measuring real-world usefulness, robustness, safety, and long-term behavior
• Own alignment, safety, and guardrail strategy as first-class product concerns
• Guide exploration of frontier techniques such as retrieval-augmented training, mixture-of-experts, distillation, multi-agent orchestration, and multimodal systems
• Shape early product intelligence direction in partnership with product and application engineering
• Set the technical bar for research rigor, judgment, and taste across the organization

Requirements

• Deep experience building or evolving real machine learning systems used in production
• Strong technical judgment regarding model behavior, failure modes, and long-horizon trade-offs
• A builder’s mindset focused on real-world systems
• Ability to make high-impact decisions with incomplete information
• Obsession with evaluation, correctness, and long-term system behavior
• High ownership mentality with a founder-like approach to operations