Head of Research And Development

Astera is building an AI-powered consumer platform for events. We study how real-world events evolve and propagate through markets, and build causal and world-model AI systems that reason and act on that structure in real time, shipping research directly into a live product used by real people.

We are looking for a senior researcher to help define and drive Astera’s core research agenda. You will lead work at the intersection of world models, causal AI, and multimodal reasoning, designing systems that understand how events propagate through complex, real-time environments and act on that understanding in production.

This is a founding-level research role. You will set research direction, not just execute on it. The right person has strong research taste, a track record of high-impact work, and the conviction to bet on ideas before the field catches up. You should be as comfortable writing a paper as you are debugging a training run.

• Define and lead Astera’s research roadmap across world models, causal reasoning, and multimodal intelligence
• Design novel architectures and training methodologies for systems that model event propagation in real-world, non-stationary environments
• Take ideas from conception to experimentation to production — your research ships into a live consumer product
• Collaborate closely with research engineers and product engineers to translate research insights into scalable systems
• Publish findings and represent Astera’s technical vision externally
• Mentor and attract exceptional research talent as the team scales

• Have 5+ years of experience in ML research with a strong publication record (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or equivalent)
• Have deep expertise in one or more of: world models, causal inference, structured prediction, multimodal learning, reinforcement learning, or probabilistic modeling
• Have a track record of owning a research agenda end-to-end — choosing the right problems, not just solving assigned ones
• Are fluent in PyTorch and can implement and debug models from scratch
• Thrive in small, fast-moving teams where research and engineering are inseparable
• Care about building things that work in the real world, not just on benchmarks

• Hold a PhD in ML, statistics, physics, applied math, computer science, or a related quantitative field
• Have experience applying ML to financial markets, time series, or event-driven systems
• Have contributed to or built open-source research tools or frameworks
• Have advised or mentored junior researchers in an academic or industry lab setting

We are a small, research-driven team where everyone has outsized impact. Engineers do research. Researchers ship code. The distance between an idea and production is measured in days, not quarters. We value clarity of thought, speed of iteration, and strong research taste — the instinct for which problems matter and which experiments will actually teach you something. We are not interested in incremental work.

We want people who think from first principles, move fast, and care deeply about craft.

Send your CV, a link to your most relevant work, and a brief note on why Astera to akshaydings.