AI Research Team Lead

Description

About Cyera

Come join the company building the security operating model for the age of AI. AI has changed how data is used - and security must change with it. Cyera's mission is to empower businesses to accelerate AI Adoption by defining a holistic approach to securing AI - from data to access to model. Instead of perimeter controls and static policies, Cyera provides a unified control plane that understands relationships between data, access, and behaviors across humans, systems, and AI. Backed by the world’s leading investors and working with a large and growing list of Fortune 1000 companies, we are looking for world-class talent to join us as we usher in the new era of data and AI security.

About the Role

As an AI Research Team Lead on Cyera’s Research group, you will mentor a talented team of researchers, set the strategic vision for research initiatives, and drive team-wide project goals. You’ll partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership to turn open-ended data-security challenges into measurable experiments and shipped features. You will manage the critical balance between research exploration and product delivery, owning the end-to-end lifecycle-from problem framing and data strategy to evaluation, deployment, and ongoing monitoring-helping customers discover, protect, and govern their data at scale.

What You’ll Do

• Lead and mentor a team of AI researchers, fostering a culture of excellence and innovation while overseeing the end-to-end research lifecycle.
• You will act as the technical and strategic lead, defining team priorities, roadmap, and data science methodologies.
• Mentor and grow team members through technical guidance, career development, and peer reviews.
• Collaborate with cross-functional leadership in Product and Engineering to align research efforts with core business objectives and customer needs.
• Manage team performance, resource allocation, and timely project delivery within an agile environment.
• Develop, evaluate, and maintain deep learning and NLP solutions to enhance Cyera’s core capabilities in sensitive data classification.
• Design and architect production-grade agentic workflows. Establish rigorous evaluation pipelines to benchmark agent accuracy, latency, and cost, ensuring reliable, scalable solutions for real-world customer problems
• Innovation and creative thinking are the keys! Implementing ML models to the entire research process - clustering, text extraction, document analysis, and tabular data classification.
• Join a “full stack” AI group, including research engineering, MLEs, data operations, and security researchers. You will accelerate the path from research to production, ensuring results are both quick and precise.

Requirements

Who You Are

Must-Haves

• BSc in computer science, math, physics, or a related field
• 7+ years of experience as an AI Researcher/NLP Researcher/Applied Scientist, including experience leading or managing research teams
• Proven track record of building and managing high-performing AI research / Data Science teams.
• Solid grounding in core machine and deep learning concepts and techniques, data challenges (imbalance, scaling etc.), and evaluation.
• Demonstrated expertise in applying LLMs - prompt engineering and prompt tuning (few-shot, chain-of-thought, tool/function calling, routing), task adaptation (instruction/SFT, PEFT/LoRA, DPO/RLHF), retrieval-augmented generation, rigorous evaluation and production deployment with appropriate safety, latency, and cost controls.
• Self-learner, initiator, able to quickly learn new technologies
• Experience in NLP - a significant advantage

Why Join Us?

At Cyera, we care about collaboration, innovation, and agility. We take “teamwork” seriously-with our inclusive and supportive culture at the forefront-and we’re just as serious about nurturing Cyerans to grow, both personally and professionally.

Feel free to apply even if your experience doesn’t tick every box.

We’re building something special here-and we welcome Cyerans with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.