Principal AI Researcher (Agentic Systems & AI Infrastructure)

About the company Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in technology-led companies across healthcare, cyber, and national security. Trase Systems, co-founded in 2023, builds AI systems for enterprise use and focuses on reducing the complexity and risk of deploying AI. About the role The Principal AI Researcher will define the long-term research direction for Trase OS, the agentic execution platform powering autonomous systems in regulated environments. This is a hands-on technical leadership role spanning research, systems, and product, with responsibility for turning frontier AI research into production-grade systems. Responsibilities - Define and evolve the long-term AI/ML research strategy and technical roadmap for Trase OS. - Lead large-scale experimentation and prototyping efforts and translate research into production systems. - Drive original research in agentic systems, autonomous execution, multi-agent orchestration, post-training, SLM/LLM architectures, and applied AI infrastructure. - Design model behavior in long-lived execution environments, including tool use, planning, memory, reasoning, and human-in-the-loop controls. - Establish evaluation methods and reliability frameworks for autonomous systems, including benchmarking, regression testing, safety, controllability, and production behavior analysis. - Drive architecture decisions across orchestration, model serving, routing, inference, and infrastructure governance. - Partner with engineering and product teams to operationalize research outcomes into deployable systems and enterprise workflows. - Build AI systems for regulated and constrained environments, including secure cloud, on-premise, and air-gapped deployments. - Contribute to the AI research community through papers, publications, conferences, architecture proposals, and thought leadership. - Mentor across the organization and influence technical direction, research rigor, and experimentation practices. Requirements - 12–15+ years of experience in machine learning, AI systems, or applied AI research at a Principal, Distinguished, or equivalent level. - Strong research and publication track record, including papers, major technical contributions, or active participation in frontier AI research. - Experience publishing at top-tier conferences or contributing influential open-source, research, or AI infrastructure systems. - Experience conducting large-scale experimentation with significant compute infrastructure and iterative model/system analysis. - Deep expertise in one or more areas including agentic systems, LLMs, generative AI, multi-agent systems, reasoning systems, reinforcement learning, orchestration infrastructure, AI systems reliability, NLP, multimodal systems, or deep learning. - Hands-on experience with agent-based systems, prompt engineering, RAG, RLHF, SLMs, fine-tuning/post-training techniques, tool integration, memory systems, and human-in-the-loop orchestration. - Proven experience building, deploying, and operating enterprise-grade AI systems at scale. - Strong understanding of production ML behavior, including reliability, latency, cost tradeoffs, observability, evaluation, regression testing, and failure modes. - Strong systems thinking and cross-functional leadership with engineering and product teams. - Strong programming and prototyping skills in Python and modern ML infrastructure stacks, with Java or related systems languages preferred. - Experience deploying AI/ML systems in regulated, constrained, or enterprise environments. Nice to have - PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI, Systems, or a related field. - Experience building and operating AI/ML platforms supporting the full model lifecycle. - Experience optimizing ML inference or orchestration systems in real-time, distributed, or resource-constrained environments. Benefits & perks - 100% employer-paid comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family. - Paid maternity and paternity leave for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay. - Unlimited PTO with management approval. - Opportunities for professional development and continued learning. - Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives. - Mental health benefits through Tara Mind. Compensation Salary range is $250,000–$300,000. The post also mentions optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives, plus strong performance-based advancement opportunities as the firm grows.