Staff Applied Researcher

HQ: San Franciscofull timeOn Site

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senior

$220k–$300k

H1B: no

Lightfield The Staff Applied Researcher leads frontier research projects in simulation, world modeling, and self-improvement to build a Business World Model. They design evaluations, build benchmarks, and publish research while mentoring a growing research team.

Responsibilities

We’re starting Lightfield Research to build a Business World Model through frontier research in simulation, world modeling and self-improvement. We’re hiring applied researchers and research scientists to lead its first projects.
You’ll report directly to Ves Stoyanov, co-founder and Chief AI Officer, previously at Facebook AI, where he co-authored RoBERTa and XLM-R. You’ll work alongside AI engineers who take research into production and GTM experts who help define tasks and quality.
Researchers at Lightfield own projects from the first question through measurable product impact and publication. You’ll help shape the lab’s research agenda, culture and reputation as it grows.
Lead research projects in evaluation, benchmarks, deal prediction, simulation and self-improvement.
Design empirical evaluations of Lightfield’s AI system using LLM-as-judge, rubric-based grading, offline replay and A/B tests, on both production and offline data.
Build benchmarks for core GTM tasks such as list building, CSV imports, mail intelligence, record updates and outbound. Measure Lightfield against frontier models and competitors.
Build simulated companies with users and streams of email, meetings and knowledge, where the right answers are known. Use them to evaluate the full system end to end.
Develop techniques that let Lightfield improve as it operates, at the world, company and user levels. These include reinforcement learning and, where it pays off, fine-tuning.
Model deal probability and the factors behind it, and ship them as product features.
Improve cost and quality trade-offs across the AI system, including inference cost.
Publish research blog posts, open benchmarks, arXiv reports and papers, and present at conferences and meetups.
Help build a world-class research team by recruiting and mentoring teammates.

Qualification

Experience building simulations

Required

You are rigorous about experimental design and can tell a real improvement from noise.
You write strong Python and are comfortable working in a production codebase (TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL) alongside engineers.
You can drive an ambiguous problem independently and balance ambitious goals with frequent, visible results.
You communicate clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, in writing and in talks.
You are energized by building AI that businesses depend on to do their jobs.

Preferred

Experience building simulations, synthetic data or RL environments.
Experience with forecasting or predictive modeling on business data.
Experience creating benchmarks adopted by others.

Benefits

Medical
Dental
Vision
401(k)
PTO
Equity/RSU
Parental Leave

Company

Lightfield

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Source: ashby

Active within the past hour

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Must-Have Skills for This Role

Machine LearningNLPLLMsReinforcement LearningEvaluation DesignBenchmarking

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