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Founding Research Scientist

Worktrace AI

Worktrace AI

San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Mar 21, 2026

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Engineering

About us

At Worktrace AI, our our mission is to eliminate the AI divide. Frontier AI labs are developing AI that can free people to focus on meaningful, high-impact work—yet, most teams don’t know where to start and are being left behind. We’re building AI that helps teams uncover their best automation opportunities and build those automations.

The role

We are hiring a Founding Research Scientist to develop AI that can close the growing chasm between agent capabilities and real work. We are building technology to continuously find the right tasks for agents and improve agent performance in their environment. To achieve this ambitious goal, the Founding Research Scientist will set the research direction, develop novel AI techniques, and build the research culture of a growing technical team.

What you’ll do

  • Set the research vision for how to transform real work into AI agents

  • Develop novel techniques to reach SOTA in screen understanding and automation

  • Collaborate with Product, Design, and Engineering to transform novel research techniques into robust production experiences

  • Set the talent and culture standards for Worktrace AI’s research team

You’ll excel in this role if you

  • Have demonstrated ability to own and pursue a research agenda, including choosing impactful research problems and autonomously carrying out long-running projects

  • Have a track record of coming up with creative ideas to solve hard technical problems

  • Are always keeping up with latest developments in generative AI research and tools

  • Find joy in delivering AI magic moments to users

Benefits and perks

  • Top-of-market salary and equity

  • Visa sponsorship

  • Generous health and dental insurance for you and dependents

  • Unlimited PTO

  • 401K

The Team

Our founders are Angela Jiang (CMU PhD), an early product manager at OpenAI and led the launches of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and Deepak Vasisht (MIT PhD), a CS Professor at UIUC who has deployed cutting edge AI into industries spanning agriculture to space. Our team are builders that come from Google DeepMind, Meta, MIT, McKinsey, Twitter, Uber, and HPE. Join us.

Backed by the best in AI and Enterprise

We are supported with a $9.4M seed round led by 8VC and Conviction with participation from funds like OpenAI, SV Angel, and Genius Ventures. Our angels include industry leaders, including Mira Murati (CEO of Thinking Machines Lab), Nick Turley (Head of ChatGPT), Logan Kilpatrick (Google DeepMind), and Ranveer Chandra (Microsoft).