FirstPrinciples

Manager

• Define a research agenda spanning near-term capabilities, reusable platforms, and field-shaping bets.
• Manage, mentor, and grow researchers with strong scientific taste, technical depth, and ownership.
• Fully own the business impact of research by connecting it to product, market, and user needs, setting clear milestones and maximizing the potential for projects to turn into capabilities.
• Frame bold research theses and design decisive experiments, baselines, evaluations, and failure analyses.
• Remain technically engaged in model development, post-training, data strategy, evaluation, and critical implementations.
• Form integrated squads with engineering and domain experts from the outset of a program.
• Help prototypes become reliable, reproducible, and reusable systems without losing their scientific insight.
• Build compounding assets such as models, datasets, verifiers, benchmarks, simulations, agent runtimes, and research infrastructure.
• Use evidence to decide when to deepen, redirect, scale, publish, protect, open-source, deploy, or conclude a line of work.
• Influence broader research strategy, hiring, technical standards, infrastructure, and resource allocation.

Senior Research Manager

Engineering Manager

• Manage, coach, and develop a team of four to six engineers
• Form and lead multidisciplinary squads
• Translate open-ended research goals into technical strategies
• Partner closely with researchers and physicists
• Create effective paths for collaboration between researchers and engineers
• Guide architecture, interfaces, technical standards, and implementation decisions
• Establish clear ownership and decision-making across teams
• Influence engineering strategy beyond immediate team

Senior Engineering Manager

Software Engineer

• Research, design, and test novel, research‑specific model architectures that integrate academic literature, natural language processing (NLP), symbolic reasoning, and other methods to orchestrate the scientific process.
• Prototype and build custom tokenizers for LaTeX symbols and physical units to be treated as tokens.
• Explore alternatives to transformers through in-depth research and provide practical recommendations for model development.
• Develop reinforcement-learning loops to enable models to run independent and internal thought experiments.
• Design and automate data ingestion pipelines in collaboration with our Data Scientists & Engineers that aggregates science literature, metadata, experimental data, equations and other data sources in a robust and scalable manner.
• Establish custom benchmarks to assess the models’ understanding of physical concepts, mathematical reasoning abilities, and ability to minimize hallucinations for the benefit of scientific reliability.
• Refine and release datasets and baselines once internal tests are stable.
• Run and track model training jobs while leading the technical team through set-up, monitoring progress, and constraining costs within budget.
• Develop approaches to stage “practice runs” in a sandbox environment to develop the model’s abilities to explore ideas independently while logging results for later review.
• Develop a framework to evaluate the models’ learning using visual and statistical tools to spot patterns and blind spots.
• Add guard-rails and tests that flag poor quality model output.
• Maintain internal tools to track lists of known issues, noting failures, clear fixes, and improvements to be integrated into future development.
• Work with the engineering team to ensure product feasibility and robust architecture.
• Translate technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders in clear terms.
• Present findings in clear updates to the technical team in order to keep the broader team appraised of progress against research milestones.

Technical Staff Member, Research

General Counsel

• We are hiring our first in-house legal counsel to build the legal function at FirstPrinciples.
• You will serve as the primary legal partner for the entire organization globally.
• Support our Canadian foundation, our US 501(c)(3), and future international entities, working across borders, legal systems, and institutional norms.
• Work closely with the executive leadership team and will be involved early in shaping how the organization is structured & operates.
• Develop and oversee AI governance frameworks, including responsible AI policies, model documentation standards, and regulatory compliance across jurisdictions.
• Advise on intellectual property strategy, including patent evaluation, trade secrets, open-source licensing, and ownership of AI-generated research outputs.
• Maintain and regularly update the organization's website privacy policy and terms of use to reflect evolving legal requirements, product changes, and best practices.
• Ensure compliance with emerging AI and data regulations globally.
• Support corporate governance for Canadian, US, and future international entities, including board matters, resolutions, and regulatory obligations.
• Coordinate with the Director of Finance on key regulatory filings including Form 990 (IRS), T3010 (CRA), and other global compliance filings.
• Coordinate with external counsel in the US and other jurisdictions as needed.
• Draft and negotiate vendor agreements, NDAs, and other commercial contracts used across the organization.
• Provide guidance on export controls, sanctions compliance, and cross-border data and AI model transfers.
• Structure, draft, and negotiate data acquisition, licensing, and usage agreements with academic institutions, research consortia, publishers, and other data providers across multiple jurisdictions.
• Advise on data rights, permitted uses, restrictions, and risk exposure in the context of AI-driven research and model development.
• Lead legal structuring and negotiation of collaboration agreements with universities, research institutes, nonprofits, and other partners globally.
• Draft and negotiate MOUs, research collaboration agreements, joint research agreements, and related frameworks.
• Ensure agreements align with FirstPrinciples’ mission, nonprofit obligations, and long-term research goals across jurisdictions.
• Develop and manage legal frameworks for fellowships, internships, co-op programs, visiting researcher arrangements, and academic secondments across Canada, the US, and other regions.
• Draft and review offer letters, program agreements, and related documentation in coordination with the Director of Talent and Director of Finance.
• Advise on IP ownership, publication rights, confidentiality, and conflicts of interest related to research talent.
• Advise on cross-border charitable solicitation, donor restrictions, grant agreements, and nonprofit regulatory requirements.
• Support board governance, conflict of interest policies, and compliance with private benefit rules.
• Identify legal and regulatory risks early and provide clear, practical guidance to leadership.
• Help design legal processes that scale as the organization grows internationally without slowing execution.
• Act as a thought partner on new legal questions at the intersection of AI, data, nonprofit law, and global research collaboration.

Senior Research Manager

Senior Engineering Manager

Technical Staff Member, Research

Director of Legal