Founding AI Architect/Principal Research Engineer

Founding AI Architect / Principal Research EngineerNeurosymbolic AI | Knowledge Representation | Reasoning Systems | Concept Graphs | RemoteWe’re partnering with a highly ambitious early-stage AI company building a fundamentally different kind of intelligence platform. Not another LLM wrapper. Not another thin RAG product. Not another workflow tool with prompts underneath.

This team is building a cognitive operating system designed around structured reasoning, persistent memory, contextual understanding and explainable intelligence.

At the centre of the platform is a concept-centric intelligence layer: a system that can ingest messy multimodal information, identify and evolve concepts over time, represent relationships formally, reason over structured knowledge, preserve provenance, and expose the reasoning process in a way that is inspectable and useful.

They are now looking for a senior technical anchor to help define and build this core layer. This is not a narrow research role, nor a pure management role. It sits somewhere between Principal Research Engineer, Founding AI Architect and VP of AI: deeply hands-on, but with real ownership over the technical architecture, roadmap and eventual team around this area.

You will help shape the foundational reasoning and memory architecture behind the product.

• Relevant Backgrounds (Deep experience in one or more of the following areas)
• Knowledge representation and reasoning
• Ontology design, ontology evolution or semantic modelling
• Knowledge graphs, semantic graphs or concept graphs
• RDF, OWL, SHACL, SPARQL, linked data or semantic web technologies
• Automated reasoning, description logic, logic programming, Datalog, Prolog or rule-based systems
• Neurosymbolic AI or hybrid neural-symbolic architectures
• LLMs grounded in structured knowledge
• Graph
• RAG, semantic retrieval or knowledge-grounded generation
• Agent memory, persistent memory or cognitive architectures
• AI planning, constraint reasoning or temporal reasoning
• Provenance, explainability, traceability or trustworthy AIEntity resolution, information extraction, knowledge discovery or semantic data integration
• You might currently be a Principal Research Engineer, Staff Engineer, Applied Scientist, Research Scientist, AI Architect, Chief Scientist, CTO, senior knowledge graph engineer, ontologist, or academic researcher who wants to build.

Publication pedigree is welcome, but not essential if you have built meaningful systems.

Likewise, you do not need to match every keyword above. We are looking for depth, originality and technical judgement rather than a perfect checklist.

• Why This Role
• Founding-level ownership over the core intelligence architecture
• Meaningful equity
• Work directly with highly technical founders
• Early commercial traction already in place
• Build core IP rather than peripheral AI features
• Shape the technical direction
• Opportunity to build the team around your domain as the company scales
• If this sounds like your kind of problem, I’d love to chat.adam@zebrapeople.com