AI Research Scientist - Optexity

Pear

$150K — $180K *
Healthcare
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of research experience with a focus on defining new problems
  • Proficiency in training machine learning models using Python
  • Master's degree or higher in Machine Learning or a related field
  • Comfortable navigating open-ended and ambiguous challenges
  • Desire to publish findings in addition to deploying solutions
  • Self-starter with a strong sense of ownership
  • Preference for startup environments over established tech companies

Responsibilities

  • Analyze proprietary clinical data to guide product development
  • Create clinical reasoning models to enhance workflows for physicians and clinics
  • Develop benchmarks revealing limitations of current LLMs in clinical reasoning
  • Assess computer-use models within real-world applications
  • Manage the entire training and evaluation pipeline for models
  • Transform abstract problems into actionable models with minimal guidance
  • Document research findings in technical reports and scholarly papers

Benefits

  • Direct daily collaboration with company founders
  • Significant influence over the technical direction and scope of projects
  • Access to comprehensive computing resources and data for research
  • Equity opportunities alongside a competitive salary
  • Support for visa sponsorship if needed
Full Job Description
Why this role exists

Most research roles at this stage hand you a dataset everyone already has and ask you to be marginally better than the last person who tried. Here you get data nobody else has - real clinical reasoning trajectories from practicing physicians - and the room to figure out what to do with it. This is a founding research hire: you'll define the agenda as much as execute it, with direct founder access, real compute, and nothing between an idea and an experiment.

What you'll do
  • Work with real, proprietary clinical data from hospital and clinic partners to surface insights that shape model and product direction
  • Build clinical reasoning models that improve physician and clinic workflows
  • Design and publish benchmarks that expose where current LLMs fall short on real clinical reasoning
  • Evaluate computer-use models on real-world tasks
  • Own the training and evaluation pipeline end to end
  • Take open-ended problems from question to working model, with minimal predefined structure
  • Write up findings as technical reports and papers

Ideal candidate
  • Has real research experience - can define a problem, not just execute a known one
  • Has trained models before (not just fine-tuned APIs) and is fluent in Python
  • Master's or higher in ML or a related field
  • Energized by open-ended problems and ambiguity
  • Wants to publish, not just ship
  • Takes ownership without needing to be guided
  • Genuinely wants a startup over big tech - speed and ambiguity as defaults, not exceptions

Nice to have
  • Prior founder or founding-engineer experience
  • Strong product taste
  • Worked on healthcare datasets before
  • Built LLM-powered products before
  • Ambitions to start your own company someday - we'll support that path

What you get
  • Direct, daily work with the founders, plus exposure to board and investor conversations
  • Real ownership of technical direction, with scope that grows as the company does
  • Full compute and data to do the work properly
  • Competitive salary and meaningful equity
  • Visa sponsorship available

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