Avra Head of Research (AI) at Avra leads the research team to develop relational foundation models for structured data. Responsible for portfolio management, team hiring and development, and research process cadence.
Responsibilities
This is a leadership role for a hands-on "player-coach" who will own and elevate our research function. Your mission is to scale the scientific vision for our Foundation Models for Relational Data (e.g., graphs, databases). You will raise the technical bar for the entire team, and bridge the gap between cutting-edge research and production-grade capabilities that move our clients' most important metrics. You will partner deeply with our Data teams (graph & data pipelines), Product Engineering & MLOps to transform ambitious ideas into the core of Avra's platform.
Leadership & Scientific Strategy
Own the research roadmap for our Foundation Models, focusing on knowledge graphs, representation learning, self-supervised and unsupervised methods.
Lead, mentor, and grow a world-class team of research scientists and engineers.
Establish and champion a rigorous research cadence: from hypothesis definition and RFCs to disciplined experimentation and clear, data-driven decision-making.
Hands-On Research & Engineering
Design and implement state-of-the-art GNNs for our unique, large-scale graph. Solve complex problems in node, edge, and graph-level tasks, multi-scale embeddings, and temporal/inductive generalization.
Build reliable, reproducible training and evaluation pipelines using PyTorch, PyG, and distributed training frameworks.
Define and maintain our gold-standard benchmarks, ensuring statistically sound model comparisons.
Production & Delivery
Collaborate with Product Engineering to productize models to serve both batch and online inference to our customers.
Partner with our GTM teams to define success criteria for enterprise clients, and to communicate the impact of your team's work to technical and executive stakeholders.
Qualification
Solid software engineering fundamentalsPretrained foundation models at scaleBuilt models for creditPortugueseHow we interviewIntro call with the CTO (45 min)Deep dive (60 min)
Required
7+ years of experience in AI/ML or PhD + 4 years
Demonstrated ability to ship research into production with measurable business impact
Hands-on excellence in Python and PyTorch
Deep proficiency in graph learning libraries like PyTorch Geometric or DGL
Solid software engineering fundamentals
Preferred
Pretrained foundation models at scale
Worked on tabular or relational foundation models, in-context learning, or meta-learning
Built models for credit, fraud, or other regulated decisions
Portuguese, since our design partners are in Brazil
A record of research or open-source work that other researchers build on
How we interview
Intro call with the CTO (45 min). Your path, and what you'd want this role to be.
Deep dive (60 min). A team or research program you led: the bets, the results, and the calls you'd make differently.
