Research Scientist in London

Native is a VC backed AI startup building the world’s most accurate AI for database reasoning. This is a hard, unsolved problem that once solved will change how every enterprise operates. We recently published our results, achieving rank 1 on the industry standard benchmark. Our research team is based in London. Everyone has high agency, is obsessed with the problem we are solving, embraces the intensity of a 6-day week, and has the ambition to build something world-changing. We are exceptional research engineers and scientists taking a novel approach to accurate database reasoning.

About the role

• This is a founding role, with opportunity to set the research agenda and shape the architecture from day one.
• Drive foundational research for reasoning over complex tabular data.
• Develop and implement new encoders (including graph transformers) for complex heterogeneous data.
• Design creative and impactful self-supervised learning objectives.
• Build scalable training and evaluation pipelines.
• Guide an exceptional team of research engineers.

Required experience

• Proven ability to lead research teams tackling hard problems.
• PhD/MSc in Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science or a related field.
• Hands-on experience building and training foundation models with modern ML tools (PyTorch, Ray, JAX).
• Strong background in graph neural nets and transformer architectures.
• Track record of publications at top conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL etc…)
• Able to take ownership of whatever needs doing.
• Experience optimising training runs on GPU clusters.

Nice to have:

• Experience with reinforcement learning and large language models.

This is a rare chance to join a founding team operating at the frontier of AI, with the resources to win.

Impact: You will push the frontier of foundation models for an under-explored, massively valuable domain.

Team: We are a small, collaborative, world-class research team based in central London. Founding level equity + competitive salary: We want you to share in the upside of what we are building. As part of the founding team, you will receive meaningful ownership alongside a salary that allows you to focus on building something great.

Direction: Chance to shape the direction of a new class of foundation model from day one.

Culture: At Native, we look for people with exceptional research and engineering ability, who want to win. Everyone loves building and is ambitious enough to want to change how the world operates for the better. We run towards hard problems. We are creative problem solvers, who keep going until we find the underlying principle of the problem, and build to solve that. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, are intrinsically motivated and want to have a huge impact, we are a great fit.