VP Research And Engineering

Solumn AI helps frontier AI labs understand and improve how their models behave in challenging, real-world environments. We build the evaluation environments, research infrastructure and methods that test AI systems against frontier labs’ safety and alignment standards, and we turn that research into evaluations and training data that measurably improve model behaviour.

We’re hiring a hands-on technical leader to own our engineering direction and help shape what we research next. This is not a management-only VP role. You’ll build core systems, make the big architectural calls, lead strong engineers, and work directly with the founders to turn open AI safety questions into rigorous experiments.

How you will contribute

• Engineering platform: architect scalable infrastructure for environment provisioning, model execution, experiment orchestration, data pipelines, observability and reproducibility
• Frontier evaluation environments: lead the build of realistic agentic environments, including tool use, multi-agent systems, software and cybersecurity settings, long-horizon tasks, sandboxed execution and robust verifiers
• Research engineering: co-develop new directions in AI safety and alignment, turn hypotheses into controlled experiments, scrutinise metrics and diagnose failure modes
• The technical team: hire and mentor engineers and research engineers, and set a high bar for architecture, testing and technical review while staying hands-on

What success looks like

• First 60 days: own the technical landscape, flag the critical architectural risks, and take charge of a high-priority environment or platform capability
• First 120 days: deliver reusable evaluation infrastructure, stronger verification and QA, and a clear operating model for the team
• First 180 days: enable Solumn to create and scale novel evaluation environments independently, and co-lead at least one research initiative with an externally credible output

Who you are

• You have strong computer science and systems engineering judgement, shown through complex systems you’ve shipped into production
• You’ve built things from zero, ideally at an early-stage startup, and made a meaningful system work at scale
• You understand LLMs, transformers, inference, agents, tool use and evaluation well beyond API integration
• You can read research, question experimental assumptions, spot confounders, and turn uncertain ideas into rigorous prototypes
• You lead through technical ownership, mentorship and sound decisions
• A prior VP title, large-team management experience or publications are not required

Full-time · 6-day work week · 100% Remote