Thesis

Autonomous AI research

Member of Technical Staff

$120K - $170K0.75% - 2.00%San Francisco, CA, US
Job type
Full-time
Role
Engineering, Machine learning
Experience
Any (new grads ok)
Visa
US citizen/visa only
Skills
PostgreSQL, Python, Rust, Deep Learning
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Sergio Charles
Sergio Charles
Co-Founder & CEO

About the role

As a Member of Technical Staff, you will design and build the architectures, evaluation loops, training systems, and orchestration layers that allow machine learning research to compound. Your work will become the foundation for neo labs applying AI to materials discovery, robotics, drug discovery, climate science, and other frontier domains.

What You’ll Work On

  • Autonomous R&D systems

    Design workflows for hypothesis generation, experiment planning, model training, evaluation, debugging, and iteration.

  • The hill-climbing engine

    Build systems that search large spaces of architectures, hyperparameters, datasets, losses, and training procedures, using each result to improve the next experiment.

  • Frontier AI infrastructure

    Engineer the APIs, schedulers, queues, storage, and observability that run many experiments reliably in parallel across models, datasets, and GPUs.

  • Recursive improvement loops

    Create systems where better models produce better experiments, and better experiments produce better models.

Who You Are

  • You have trained real ML models

    You have hands-on experience training machine learning models, whether in deep learning, reinforcement learning, evolutionary search, optimization, or related areas.

  • You are strong at systems

    You have built reliable backend, cloud, distributed, or infrastructure systems. You can reason about scalability, fault tolerance, orchestration, observability, and performance.

  • You have research taste

    You have research experience in CS, ML, AI, or a related field. Publications at top conferences like ICLR, NeurIPS, or ICML are a plus, but we care more about your ability to reason from first principles, run good experiments, and make progress on hard problems.

  • You move between research and engineering

    You can design experiments, write training code, debug infrastructure, and ship systems that actually work.

  • You are driven to explore the frontier

    You want to accelerate scientific discovery and are comfortable exploring uncharted directions with minimal supervision.

The Stack

We use whatever safely and rapidly scales the system. Today that includes Python, Rust, PyTorch, TypeScript, GPU orchestration, cloud/backend infrastructure, evaluation harnesses, experiment tracking, and the systems required to turn research into a compounding loop.

About the interview

  1. Introductory Call (1 hr)
  2. Coding + ML challenge (1hr 30)
  3. Paid 1 week trial, in person

About Thesis

Artificial intelligence has solved some of humanity’s greatest mysteries, from protein folding to forecasting chaotic weather systems. Thesis is an AI research lab automating the process of AI R&D itself.

Today, neo labs applying AI to materials discovery, robotics, drug discovery, climate science, and beyond must build their own frontier AI infrastructure from scratch. They depend on fragmented tools, handcrafted pipelines, and human intuition to make progress.

Thesis gives them an instant, autonomous frontier AI lab. It transforms AI R&D into a hill-climbing machine capable of searching a vast combinatorial space of hypotheses, experiments, and evaluations. By using the outcome of every experiment to optimize the next, Thesis creates a loop of recursive self-improvement: turning machine learning research into a compounding system rather than a sequence of manual attempts.

Our mission is to put these systems into the hands of labs doing groundbreaking work, promoting them to the absolute frontier of science and engineering. The breakthroughs that define our generation will come from human research directives amplified by autonomous AI R&D.

We hire exceptional individuals, the underrated and the dauntless, to invent the future of AI research.

Thesis
Founded:2025
Batch:F25
Team Size:3
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Founders
Luigi Charles
Luigi Charles
Founder
Sergio Charles
Sergio Charles
Co-Founder & CEO