AI Research - Scientist​/Engineer

About Sentient

Sentient is building the world’s first open and community-built AGI platform — an open-source intelligence network designed to rival and complement closed systems such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Our mission is simple yet bold:
to make open-source AI win.

Sentient is already a research powerhouse, delivering breakthroughs that outperform leading closed-source labs across benchmarks and applications:

• GRID – the backbone network of agents, models, and data driving cutting-edge research and powering applications.
• Sentient Chat – consumer gateway to the GRID, with 2M+ users on the waitlist.
• Dobby LLMs – open-source model family embedding human-like values at scale; ranked #1 on the UGI benchmark with the largest personality layer in AI.
• Open Deep Search (ODS) – open-source AI search framework with a 75.3% FRAMES score
  , surpassing GPT-4o (~65%) and Perplexity (~45%).
• ROMA – multi-agent routing framework; #1 on Git Hub
  , outperforming Gemini 2.5 Pro and Kimi.
• Model Fingerprinting – first cryptographic framework for verifiable model ownership.

Backed by $85M in seed funding co-led by Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures
, with support from Franklin Templeton, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Symbolic Capital, IDG, and others
, Sentient is uniquely positioned to lead the future of open-source AGI.

As a Research Scientist/Engineer on the AI team at Sentient, you'll lead the development and implementation of techniques aimed at training language models and agents that have advanced reasoning capabilities:
In particular, such AI will be able to make strategic decisions in multi-agent environments with high stakes (e.g., involving financial transactions), You'll work to develop novel post training and agentic techniques and to use these to demonstrably improve AI behavior.

Take a look at the following to get a feel for the kind of work we do at Sentient.

Working Environment:

We are looking for multiple full time and intern positions. This is a work from home position with periodic in-person meetings in the US east coast and west coasts. You will work with other researchers at Sentient including Sewoong Oh (Professor, UW-Seattle) and Pramod Viswanath (Professor, Princeton).

• Develop and implement novel fine-tuning and reinforcement learning techniques using synthetic data generated from multi-turn interactions.
• Use these to design agentic systems to improve reasoning skills to be evaluated on long-horizon strategic decision making benchmarks.
• Create and maintain evaluation frameworks to measure reasoning skills and design new benchmarks.

• Have an MS/PhD in Computer Science, ML, or related field, or equivalent experience
• Possess strong programming skills, especially in Python
• Have experience with ML model training and experimentation
• Have a track record of implementing ML research
• Demonstrate strong analytical skills for interpreting experimental results
• Have experience with ML metrics and evaluation frameworks
• Excel at turning research ideas into working code
• Can identify and resolve practical implementation challenges

• Experience with language model fine-tuning and post-training
• Background in AI agents and/or reasoning research
• Published work in AI
• Experience with synthetic data generation
• Familiarity with techniques like RLHF and reward modeling
• Track record of designing and implementing novel training approaches
• Experience with model behavior evaluation and improvement

Education requirements: We require at least a masters degree in a related field or equivalent experience.