Head of AI Research - New York City

We're building the ground truth platform for AI. · Generic tools hallucinate data, confabulate reports, and don't show their work. We made accuracy the only possible outcome: every answer traces to its source, every calculation is reproducible, every insight is defensible. We're ...

Job description

We're building the ground truth platform for AI.

Generic tools hallucinate data, confabulate reports, and don't show their work. We made accuracy the only possible outcome: every answer traces to its source, every calculation is reproducible, every insight is defensible. We're starting in finance and building the foundational data layer for anywhere decisions depend on trustworthy data.

Kepler was founded by two Palantir veterans (20 years combined) who built core parts of Gotham and Foundry, created Palantir Quiver (the analytics engine behind $100M+ deals with BP and Airbus), led major DoD projects, and served as Head of Business Engineering at Citadel.

Kepler is backed by founders of OpenAI, Facebook AI, MotherDuck, dbt, Outerbounds, and others.

The Role

You'll define the research agenda that makes AI trustworthy for enterprise decisions. At Kepler, we've solved hallucination not by making models smarter, but by architecting systems where hallucination is structurally impossible. AI interprets intent. Code retrieves data. A semantic layer connects them. Every output traces to its source.

Now we need someone to push the frontier of what's possible within this architecture.

You'll lead research across agentic systems, memory architectures, retrieval mechanisms, and evaluation frameworks. You'll have access to completely differentiated financial data: structured filings, earnings transcripts, market feeds, research reports, live audio, all normalized with full provenance. This isn't another research lab building demos. Your work ships to production, powering research workflows where financial professionals make million-dollar decisions.

This role is for researchers who want to build AI systems that actually work in high-stakes environments, where every answer must be defensible and every insight must trace back to truth.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the research agenda: Identify the highest-leverage research problems at the intersection of AI reliability, agentic systems, and enterprise trust. Shape what Kepler builds next.

• Pioneer agentic architectures: Design systems for agent orchestration, task planning, and multi-step reasoning that maintain accuracy and provenance across complex research workflows.

• Advance memory and retrieval: Build novel approaches to context management, knowledge representation, and retrieval that let agents reason over millions of documents while staying grounded in sources.

• Build evaluation frameworks: Define how we measure agent quality, reliability, and trustworthiness. Create benchmarks that matter for real-world financial research.

• Ship research to production: This isn't theoretical. Your work deploys to systems used by top financial institutions. Research validates through real-world impact.

• Build and lead the research team: Hire exceptional researchers. Create an environment where breakthrough work happens and ships.

• Publish and represent Kepler: Contribute to the broader AI community through publications, open-source work, and presence at top venues like NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.

• Collaborate with founders: Work directly with leadership on technical strategy, product direction, and company vision.

What We're Looking For

• PhD in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related field

• 5+ years in AI/ML research with focus on LLMs, agents, retrieval systems, or memory architectures

• Publication record: Strong track record at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL)

• Production experience: You've shipped research to real systems with real users. You understand the gap between paper and production.

• Technical depth: Expertise in transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, retrieval-augmented generation, or memory-augmented systems

• Leadership: Experience building and leading research teams in high-stakes environments

• Research taste: Ability to identify problems that are both technically interesting and practically important

• Strong communicator who can translate complex research into clear implications for product and business

• Intellectually humble. Confident enough to lead in your domain, wise enough to collaborate across disciplines.

• Energized by hard problems where the answer isn't known

Why This Role is Different

• Differentiated data: Access to structured financial data with full provenance that doesn't exist anywhere else. Train and evaluate on real, high-quality data.

• Architecture that matters: We've built the infrastructure that makes AI trustworthy. Your research extends what's possible within a system designed for accuracy.

• Research that ships: Your work powers decisions at top financial institutions. Impact is measured in production, not citations.

• Greenfield opportunity: Define the research agenda for a company building the ground truth platform for AI.

• Founder-level collaboration: Work directly with founders who built Palantir Foundry and data infrastructure at Citadel.

Research Benefits

• Open publication policy: We actively encourage publishing at top venues and contributing to the broader AI community. Your research belongs to the field.

• Dedicated GPU capacity: Pre-reserved compute for research experiments. The computational resources to pursue ambitious ideas without fighting for allocation.

• Conference budget: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and any venue where you need to be. Travel, registration, and time to engage with the research community.

• Academic partnerships: Funding and support for collaborations with universities and research institutions.

• Differentiated data access: Train and evaluate on structured financial data with full provenance that doesn't exist anywhere else.

• Research autonomy: Define your own agenda within our mission. We hired you for your judgment.

Our Technical Stack

• Frontend: React, Typescript, Vite, Tailwind, Radix, TanStack, Zustand

• Backend: Rust, , Python, PostgreSQL, Redis

• AI/ML: OpenAI, Anthropic, MCP SDK,

• Infrastructure: AWS (S3, RDS), Docker, Temporal, Kubernetes, Dataflow

• Tools: Git, GitHub, Pulumi, Auth0, SharePoint
  

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, 401k, insurance for employees and dependents

• Automatic coverage for basic life, AD&D, and disability insurance

• Daily lunch in office

• Development environment budget - latest MacBook Pro, multiple monitors, ergonomic setup, and any development tools you need

• Unlimited PTO policy

• "Build anything" budget - dedicated funding for whatever tools, libraries, datasets, or infrastructure you need to solve technical challenges, no questions asked

• Learning budget - attend any conference, course, or program that makes you better at what we're building
  

Our Operating Principles

• Forward-Deployed with Product DNA: We own customer outcomes while building a product company. That means embedding, iterating, and deploying where our customers are. We don't win if they don't win.

• Extreme Ownership: Big vision, shared ownership. If you notice a problem, you own it. Authority comes from initiative, not job titles. Once you step up, you're accountable for the outcome.

• Production-First Engineering: We design for critical workloads from day one. Durable execution, blue/green deploys, automated rollbacks, continuous delivery with end-to-end observability. Every change lands safely and stays resilient under real-world load.

• Trust as the Default: People do their best work when confidence is mutual. We show our work, keep our promises, and flag risks before they bite. Trust isn't an aspiration. It's the baseline.

• Keep Raising the Bar: We block time for training, code-health sprints, and deep-dive tech talks. A sharper team and a cleaner stack pay compounding dividends. Continuous learning isn't a perk. It's part of the job.

Kepler is an Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. We are committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment.