{"id":489926,"url":"https://alion.io/job/origamics-founding-researcher","title":"Founding Researcher","company":{"id":34627,"name":"Origamics","domain":"origamics.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/origamics","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":165000,"max_usd":367000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":4425},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"TensorFlow","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-11T14:39:52Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-11","last_verified_at":"2026-10-29T18:29:15Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":79,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":79},"description":"Founding Researcher\nOrigamics AI · Founding team · Full-time\nWe're hiring the first researchers to join the founders. Not employee #20. Not \"early.\" Founding.\nWhat we do\nThe technology used to design boards and electronics is some of the most complex in existence, and it hasn't changed much in decades. Engineers spend enormous amounts of time on setup, scripting, debugging failures, and waiting on runs that take hours or days. A single board program can drag on for 9 to 12 months, mostly because nobody catches a problem with the board until physical testing. By then it's late, and it's expensive to fix.\nGeneral-purpose AI and LLMs don't understand circuit physics, so we're building our own models in-house, from the ground up, trained specifically on how signals and fields actually behave on a board. We take schematics straight from the tools engineers already use, run our AI to generate fabrication-ready boards, and hand them back. No rip-and-replace, no throwing away twenty years of muscle memory.\nOur vision is simple to say and hard to build: hardware design should move at the speed of software. Chips and boards aren't easy, but the tools around them just haven't kept pace with everything else.\nWe're a very small technical team by design. We've grown a company from pre-product to nine figures in annual revenue, and grown engineering orgs from 3 people to 50. We've published AI research with real citations behind it and hold multiple patents. We're now hiring the founding researchers on our team - not the fortieth - and you'd be building next to us from day one.\nWhat you'll own\nThe core physics-informed AI architectures that learn how signals, power, and EM fields actually behave on a board -* from problem formulation through training to validated accuracy against real hardware.\n\nThe research roadmap: what to model next (signal integrity, thermal, EMI/EMC, manufacturability), what data we need to get there, and how we validate against physical test results, not just benchmarks.\n\nThe data pipelines, simulation environments, and evaluation methodology that let us know a model is actually right before it ever touches a real board.\n\nThe handoff from research to production -* working directly with engineering so what you build ends up generating fabrication-ready boards that engineers trust with real hardware, not research code that never ships.\n\nThe published work and IP that comes out of what we build here -* you'll publish, attend conferences, and represent the science behind the product.\n\nThe research bar and practices for every hire who comes after you. For a while, you're it.\n\nYou might thrive here if you...\nHave taken a research idea from open problem to something that shipped and mattered - and want to do it again, this time with the equity, ownership, and title to match what you're actually doing.\n\nHave deep experience applying ML to physical or engineering systems -* physics-informed models, geometric deep learning, data-driven dynamical systems, or an adjacent domain.\n\nHave experience with JAX ideally, PyTorch, Tensorflow or similar and scientific computing tools.\n\nHave a PhD or equivalent research depth in ML, EE, or applied physics is a strong plus, not a hard requirement.\n\nHave previous experience with numerical simulations for EM and thermal problems is a plus.\n\nUnderstand the real trade-offs between model accuracy, training cost, and inference speed, and optimize for what a production system actually needs over the theoretically prettiest solution.\n\nWant to get fluent, fast, in the engineering discipline -* agentic tooling, CI, production practices -* that turns a research model into something a two-person team can actually ship and maintain, even if that's not your background yet.\n\nWould rather own one ambiguous, high-stakes research problem than ten well-scoped experiments.\n\nAre more bothered by indecision than by being wrong -* you'd rather run the experiment, learn, and correct course than deliberate.\n\nHow to apply\nEmail . Tell us the hardest research problem you've solved and why it mattered. We read every one.\n* human generated em dash","description_format":"text","description_chars":4149,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"phd","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Machine Learning","Motors, Drives & Motion Control"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-06T23:56:03Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":10,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.357,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":78,"expected_fill_days":24,"reasons":["conf:0","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-29T05:49:05Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/origamics-founding-researcher","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/origamics-founding-researcher.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-29T18:30:03Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":27356,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-30T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":34627},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=34627"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Forigamics-founding-researcher"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Forigamics-founding-researcher"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Forigamics-founding-researcher"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/origamics-founding-researcher\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Forigamics-founding-researcher"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":489926}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"origamics.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":489926},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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