Founding AI Architect/Principal Research Engineer
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Key skills for this role
About the Role
Founding AI Architect / Principal Research Engineer Neurosymbolic AI | Knowledge Representation | Reasoning Systems | Concept Graphs | Remote We’re partnering with a highly ambitious early-stage AI company building a fundamentally different kind of intelligence platform.
Key Skills for This Role
Full Job Posting
Founding AI Architect / Principal Research Engineer
Neurosymbolic AI | Knowledge Representation | Reasoning Systems | Concept Graphs | Remote
We’re partnering with a highly ambitious early-stage AI company building a fundamentally different kind of intelligence platform.
Not another LLM wrapper.
Not another thin RAG product.
Not another workflow tool with prompts underneath.
This team is building a cognitive operating system designed around structured reasoning, persistent memory, contextual understanding and explainable intelligence.
At the centre of the platform is a concept-centric intelligence layer: a system that can ingest messy multimodal information, identify and evolve concepts over time, represent relationships formally, reason over structured knowledge, preserve provenance, and expose the reasoning process in a way that is inspectable and useful.
They are now looking for a senior technical anchor to help define and build this core layer.
This is not a narrow research role, nor a pure management role.
It sits somewhere between Principal Research Engineer, Founding AI Architect and VP of AI: deeply hands-on, but with real ownership over the technical architecture, roadmap and eventual team around this area.
You will help shape the foundational reasoning and memory architecture behind the product.
Relevant Backgrounds
- (Deep experience in one or more of the following areas)
- Knowledge representation and reasoning
- Ontology design, ontology evolution or semantic modelling
- Knowledge graphs, semantic graphs or concept graphs
- RDF, OWL, SHACL, SPARQL, linked data or semantic web technologies
- Automated reasoning, description logic, logic programming, Datalog, Prolog or rule-based systems
- Neurosymbolic AI or hybrid neural-symbolic architectures
- LLMs grounded in structured knowledge
- GraphRAG, semantic retrieval or knowledge-grounded generation
- Agent memory, persistent memory or cognitive architectures
- AI planning, constraint reasoning or temporal reasoning
- Provenance, explainability, traceability or trustworthy AI
- Entity resolution, information extraction, knowledge discovery or semantic data integration
- You might currently be a Principal Research Engineer, Staff Engineer, Applied Scientist, Research Scientist, AI Architect, Chief Scientist, CTO, senior knowledge graph engineer, ontologist, or academic researcher who wants to build.
- Publication pedigree is welcome, but not essential if you have built meaningful systems.
- Likewise, you do not need to match every keyword above.
- We are looking for depth, originality and technical judgement rather than a perfect checklist.
Why This Role
- Founding-level ownership over the core intelligence architecture
- Meaningful equity
- Work directly with highly technical founders
- Early commercial traction already in place
- Build core IP rather than peripheral AI features
- Shape the technical direction
- Opportunity to build the team around your domain as the company scales
- If this sounds like your kind of problem, I’d love to chat.
- adam@zebrapeople.com
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