Applied Researcher - Scientific AI
Prime Intellect, San Francisco +4
What you will do
Every Applied Research role is externally facing. Most researchers work directly with customers, users, or research partners while maintaining a substantive research agenda.
Prime's autonomous-research study https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/measuring-autonomous-research used multi-day nanoGPT optimization tasks to examine how agents measure noise, revisit earlier experiments, and verify improvements. You will build similar experimental loops for scientific tools and datasets.
- Build long-horizon environments where agents search literature, query scientific databases, run code and domain tools, and choose experiments within a fixed compute or experimental budget.
- Turn research partners' workflows, datasets, and outcome criteria into trainable tasks, evaluations, and reward signals.
- Design verifiers for correctness, novelty, and reproducibility. Test whether agents use the underlying evidence, with checks for label leakage, lookup shortcuts, and unsupported conclusions.
