{"id":4197527,"url":"https://alion.io/job/prime-intellect-lead-applied-researcher","title":"Lead Applied Researcher","company":{"id":5907,"name":"Prime Intellect","domain":"primeintellect.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/primeintellect","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":21,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":98,"computed_at":"2026-11-12T10:38:37Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","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","New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":150000,"max":300000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":300000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":true,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Cloudflare","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"Datadog","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LangChain","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"OpenRouter","optional":false},{"name":"Perplexity","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Together AI","optional":false},{"name":"Zapier","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-19T15:29:31Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-19","last_verified_at":"2026-11-12T21:01:00Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":24,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":24},"description":"Own Your Intelligence\nPrime Intellect is building the open superintelligence stack: the infrastructure frontier AI labs build internally, made available to every ambitious AI team.\nOur platform, Lab, unifies compute, environments, evaluations, secure sandboxes, high-performance training, and deployment into one full-stack system for post-training at frontier scale - from SFT and RL to tool use, agent workflows, and continuously improving production models. We are building open frontier AI: open-source models trained end to end for long-horizon tasks like autonomous research, and the full-stack platform our own research team uses to build them. The next generation of AI companies, enterprises, and research teams do not just need more GPUs. They need the ability to turn their own workflows, tools, data, and feedback loops into superintelligence they own.\nPrime Intellect has raised $150M in total funding from Founders Fund, Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, and exceptional AI, infrastructure, and enterprise operators, including Andrej Karpathy, Dwarkesh Patel, and leaders and founders from Ramp, Perplexity, Harvey, Mercor, Zapier, Datadog, Cognition, OpenAI, Thinking Machines, Together AI, SemiAnalysis, LangChain, Browserbase, Cloudflare, Sierra, Databricks, Airbnb, OpenRouter, Standard Intelligence, Fleet, Core Auto, and more. We are looking for people who want to build at the intersection of frontier research, real infrastructure, and go-to-market for a category that does not fully exist yet.\nRole Impact\nLead an Applied Research team that makes models work on difficult customer tasks. Stay hands-on with RL experiments and take useful results through to deployment. Set the team’s priorities and decide where to spend its compute. This is a tech lead manager role, based in New York or San Francisco.\nResponsibilities\nApplied Research at Prime\nWe turn a workflow into tasks, environments, evaluations, and reward signals, run post-training experiments against real baselines, and deploy what works. When a result looks good, we find out whether the gain came from the model or from the data, harness, inference, or infrastructure. The reusable parts become shared research, open-source systems, and product capabilities.\nEvery Applied Research role is externally facing. Most researchers work directly with customers, users, or research partners while maintaining a substantive research agenda.\nRole scope\nThis is a leadership role within Prime's broader Applied Research function, based in New York or San Francisco. It requires research taste, technical depth, customer and partner judgment, exceptional recruiting, and the willingness to remain a builder. Reporting to our Head of Applied Research, you will stay directly involved with external program teams while leading technical work, recruiting, and developing the group.\nRepresentative early problems\nTurn a portfolio of field programs into research agendas with strong owners, comparable evidence, and explicit paths from domain result to shared capability.\n\nPersonally lead a high-stakes program through environment design, baseline, post-training, evaluation, and deployment while establishing the quality bar for the growing team.\n\nRecruit researchers and establish a working rhythm that keeps review rigorous without slowing the team.\n\nWhat you will own\nA small number of the hardest partner and customer research programs.\n\nRecruiting and development of the Applied Research department, including direct people management.\n\nTechnical standards for environments, evaluations, post-training experiments, failure analysis, and deployed results.\n\nMeaningful personal research, cross-program technical direction, and decisions about what becomes shared research or product capability as the team grows.\n\nProgram priorities and allocation of clusters and compute across the team's RL experiments.\n\nRequirements\nYou’ve led an applied research or research engineering team while continuing to do technical work.\n\nYou’ve run and debugged RL experiments yourself. You can explain what went wrong in a run and how you fixed it.\n\nYou can defend an experimental result. You know when a better score comes from learning and when it comes from a broken evaluation.\n\nYou know how to prioritize work across a team and explain tradeoffs to demanding customers.\n\nYou write strong Python. Other researchers can run and extend what you build.\n\nUseful background\nAround 6-8 years of relevant research or engineering work, with recent hands-on ownership.\n\nExperience at both a larger technology organization and a startup. We’re looking for disciplined management alongside the speed to build with a small team.\n\nEvidence of exceptional work\nPublications, open-source systems, benchmarks and shipped products can all be evidence. Show us difficult work you personally owned, and what you learned when it failed.\nBenefits and Perks\nCash Compensation Range of $150-300k + equity incentives\n\nFull medical, dental and vision coverage for employees and dependents.\n\nFlexible PTO.\n\n$200/month health and wellness benefit.\n\nVisa sponsorship and relocation support.\n\nProfessional development budget for courses and conferences.\n\nTeam off-sites and conference attendance.\n\nCompany-covered meals when working from our San Francisco office.\n\nIf you're excited about the opportunity to build the foundation for the future of decentralized AI and create a platform that empowers developers and researchers to push the boundaries of what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5523,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Professional development"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Reinforcement Learning","Foundation Models","AI Compute & Inference","AI Development Tools"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-12T21:01:00Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":false,"adverts_offering_sponsorship_24m":35,"sanctioned_now":false,"evidence":"Offered visa sponsorship in 35 of its adverts here in 24 months","filings_12m":0,"filings_prev_12m":0,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":null,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-12T07:36:15+00:00","sources":["Alion: sponsorship offered in the employer's own job adverts (24 months)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":85,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.855,"p_room":1,"age_days":24,"expected_fill_days":98,"reasons":["conf:5","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-13T02:34:17Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":300000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/prime-intellect-lead-applied-researcher","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/prime-intellect-lead-applied-researcher.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-13T02:34:17Z","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":5445,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-14T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"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":5907},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=5907"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fprime-intellect-lead-applied-researcher"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"free","price":{"credits":0,"usd":0},"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%2Fprime-intellect-lead-applied-researcher"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"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%2Fprime-intellect-lead-applied-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/prime-intellect-lead-applied-researcher\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fprime-intellect-lead-applied-researcher"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":4197527}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"primeintellect.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":4197527},"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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