Head of AI Research

About the Role We are a seed-stage deeptech company building an advanced materials acceleration platform at the intersection of physics-informed AI, robotics, and autonomous experimentation — with a focus on the energy sector and beyond. Our mission: compress decades of materials discovery into years by connecting frontier machine learning with real-world experimental pipelines. We are looking for a Head of AI Research to define and lead our AI-for-Materials research agenda. This is a foundational leadership role for someone who wants to shape not just a team, but a new scientific discipline — inventing the representations, learning paradigms, and evaluation frameworks that will underpin the next generation of materials discovery. What You'll Do Define a clear research vision and roadmap for AI-native materials discovery, setting thesis-level bets and identifying high-impact research directions. Identify where existing ML paradigms fall short for physical matter and specify what must be built from the ground up. Lead development of a Materials World Model that integrates experiments, simulations, and learned representations across scales. Collaborate cross-functionally with Programs, Hardware & Automation, and Software Architecture teams to embed research into end-to-end discovery loops. Ensure all models and pipelines are grounded in physical reality and continuously validated against experimental feedback — not just data-driven patterns. Balance long-horizon research ambitions with near-term deliverables and scientific rigor. Build, hire, mentor, and challenge a world-class team of senior ML researchers and computational scientists. Foster a culture of deep thinking, honest evaluation, scientific taste, and intellectual courage. Influence the broader field through external collaborations, publications, and a clear, opinionated point of view on the future of scientific AI. What We're Looking For Required: Advanced degree (PhD strongly preferred) in machine lear