Ship your first evaluation harness against the live demo agents and publish the baseline the whole company argues from.
OPEN ROLE / SIMLABS RESEARCH / 01 OF 05
Lead AI Researcher
Own the intelligence: venue-specific models, local execution and the frontier evaluation loop that decides what ships.
THE ROLE / WHAT YOU OWN
About this role.
simLabs trains its own venue-specific models and decides, with evidence, what runs in the cloud and what runs locally on the terminal itself. As Lead AI Researcher you own that whole loop: the training pipeline, the evaluation harness, the local execution strategy and the standard a capability must meet before it is allowed on a public floor.
Research here has one purpose: a better conversation for the person standing in front of the machine. You pair daily with the founders and the engineers building the runtime, and your findings ship in weeks, not papers.
THE RAMP / NO WARM-UP LAPS
Your first 90 days.
Every role here starts with real work on the live product. This is the ramp we will agree on together, and the pace we hire for.
Deliver the first in-house fine-tune: a venue model trained, evaluated and running locally on terminal hardware.
Set the model roadmap: what we train, what we adapt and what runs where, defended with your own numbers.
RESPONSIBILITIES / THE WORK
What you will do.
- 01
Own the model roadmap: what we train in house, what we adapt from open-weight models, and what must run locally for privacy, security or latency
- 02
Build and run the training pipeline for venue-specific models: data preparation, fine-tuning, distillation and quantization for terminal hardware
- 03
Design the evaluation harness for conversational quality: grounding, refusal behavior, noisy-audio robustness, latency and multilingual coverage
- 04
Reduce frontier research to floor-ready runtime capability together with the platform engineers
- 05
Set the bar for speech recognition and speech synthesis quality across languages, accents and loud environments
- 06
Define dataset standards with the data team for training, evaluation and governed fleet learning
- 07
Prototype the next embodiments with the team: digital humans, holographic presence and spatial grounding
TECH / THE STACK
What you will work with.
We run across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure in the cloud, and on our own terminal hardware on the floor.
Modeling
- Python and PyTorch
- Open-weight model families
- Fine-tuning, LoRA and adapters
- Distillation and quantization
Serving and edge
- GPU inference on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure
- Local inference runtimes on terminal hardware
- CUDA, TensorRT and ONNX Runtime
- Speech recognition and speech synthesis pipelines
Evaluation
- Custom evaluation harnesses
- Human-in-the-loop review flows
- Regression suites built from live venue scenarios
Infrastructure
- Kubernetes and containers
- Experiment tracking
- Multi-cloud GPU capacity planning
QUALIFICATIONS / THE BAR
What you bring.
Must have
- 6+ years in applied machine learning with deep, hands-on transformer experience
- You have taken fine-tuned or distilled models into production and lived with the consequences
- Evaluation-first instincts: you distrust a demo until the harness agrees
- Strong Python and PyTorch engineering; you write code that ships, not notebooks that rot
- Experience with voice or conversational systems in the real world
- Comfortable owning a research agenda inside a small, senior team
Bonus points
- Edge and on-device inference experience
- Retrieval and grounding architectures for factual answers
- Multilingual model work
- Digital human, avatar or speech animation pipelines
- Published research or open-source contributions
THE CULTURE / DAY TO DAY
How we work.
EVIDENCE OVER OPINION
Demos, harnesses and floor tests settle debates. The best argument in the room is a measurement.
WEEKS, NOT QUARTERS
Work ships to a real floor fast. You will watch a stranger use what you built this month.
SMALL AND SENIOR
No layers, no committees. Five hires, two founders, one room when it matters.
REAL FLOORS
We test in public: noise, glare, hurry and all. If it works there, it works.
WHAT WE OFFER / STRAIGHT TERMS
€7,500 to €11,000 per month.
Depending on experience, with founding-team equity and profit sharing on top. We are a startup: the band is transparent, the upside is real and the ownership is yours.
- €7,500 to €11,000 per month, depending on experience, the same transparent band for every open role
- Founding-team equity: you own a piece of what you build
- Profit sharing once the machines are earning
- Senior ownership of a whole layer of the product, with direct access to both founders
- Amsterdam base with hybrid flexibility, plus time on real venue floors
- The hardware and tools you need, without a procurement fight
APPLY / SIMLABS RESEARCH
Tell us what you would build first.
Twelve months from now, every conversation on every terminal runs on intelligence you shaped. Send a short note with a repo, a model card, an evaluation harness or a war story about a model that failed interestingly. A conversation with a founder follows within days.
Apply as Lead AI Researcher