Research Scientist — Neuro-Symbolic AI

About the Role

Rippletide is building the decision infrastructure layer for enterprise AI agents, and we are hiring a Research Scientist to advance the neuro-symbolic foundations of our hypergraph reasoning engine. Based in our San Francisco office, you will conduct original research at the intersection of graph theory, constraint reasoning, and neural representations — with a direct path from paper to production. You will work closely with the Chief Scientist and engineering team to make AI agents provably controllable and auditable at enterprise scale.

What You'll Do

• Lead research initiatives in neuro-symbolic reasoning, hypergraph inference, and constraint satisfaction with direct application to Rippletide's Decision Context Graph.
• Publish at top AI and ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI) and represent Rippletide in the US research community.
• Collaborate with the engineering team to translate research into production components with full observability and benchmarking.
• Engage with the Bay Area academic and industry AI research community — Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU, and ecosystem partners.
• Contribute to Rippletide's scientific narrative, white papers, and technical blog posts.
• Mentor junior researchers and engineers on research methodology and rigorous experimentation.

What We're Looking For

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, Mathematics, or a closely related field.
• Published research in neuro-symbolic AI, knowledge graphs, graph neural networks, probabilistic reasoning, or formal methods.
• Strong programming skills in Python (PyTorch, JAX, or equivalent); ability to implement and benchmark novel algorithms.
• Track record of bridging research and engineering — you value both rigor and deployment.
• Excellent communicator; comfortable presenting to both academic audiences and enterprise engineering teams.
• Based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco.
• Entrepreneur mindset — you treat problems as opportunities, take ownership instinctively, and move with urgency.

Nice to Have

• Post-doctoral or industry research experience (Stanford HAI, MIT CSAIL, Google Brain, FAIR, etc.).
• Familiarity with LLM reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation, or tool-augmented agents.
• Experience with hypergraph data structures or temporal knowledge graph reasoning.
• Previous experience as a founder or co-founder.

What We Offer

• Competitive researcher compensation and meaningful early-employee equity.
• Research budget for publications, conference travel, and compute.
• Direct collaboration with Chief Scientist and engineering leadership.
• San Francisco office at 2 Embarcadero, embedded in the world's most active AI ecosystem.
• Full US benefits including health, dental, and vision.