Research Fellow

About the Company

FirstPrinciples is a non-profit organization building an autonomous AI Physicist to understand the nature of reality. By combining AI, symbolic reasoning, and autonomous research capabilities, we are developing a platform that actively contributes to physics research to accelerate progress on the deepest unsolved problems in the universe.

Responsibilities

• Own a well-scoped research direction contributing to the AI Physicist's reasoning capabilities
• Research, design, and test novel model architectures combining NLP, symbolic reasoning, and scientific workflows
• Prototype embedding representations for physical concepts and mathematical objects
• Investigate alternatives to transformer-based architectures
• Develop reinforcement learning loops for internal thought experiments
• Design and automate scalable data ingestion pipelines for scientific literature and experimental data
• Create custom benchmarks to measure physical understanding and mathematical reasoning
• Run and track model training jobs while managing compute usage
• Implement tests and guardrails to identify low-quality or unsafe outputs
• Collaborate with engineers to ensure research is production-ready

Requirements

• PhD or postdoctoral researcher in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Theoretical Physics, or a related field
• Track record of research in model architectures, representation learning, reasoning systems, or formal physical reasoning
• Ability to translate abstract theory into testable computational systems
• Strong builder instincts and ability to operate independently
• Comfort working across disciplinary boundaries