Founding Lead AI Scientist – Agentic Systems for Marketing Automation
Merit is hiring a Founding Lead AI Scientist for a venture-backed AI company building the next generation of agentic systems for marketing automation and growth. This is an opportunity to define the scientific and architectural foundations of an AI company where autonomy, safety, and scale come together.
About the Company
Merit connects world-class engineers and researchers with innovative startups and scale-ups. The company is redefining how B2B marketing teams grow by creating an autonomous platform that plans, acts, and learns—spinning up campaigns, generating creative, pacing budgets, and self-correcting in live traffic. The organization is expanding rapidly across the US and Europe.
The Opportunity
As the Founding Lead AI Scientist, you’ll architect and deliver the next generation of agentic AI systems. You’ll design, train, and deploy autonomous agents that make and execute real-time growth decisions — operating across research, engineering, and product boundaries. You’ll move from notebook to production, establishing experimentation frameworks, building evaluation harnesses, and translating cutting-edge AI research into tangible business outcomes.
In your first 12 months, you’ll focus on:
* Designing and deploying agent architectures that plan, act, and learn in complex environments
* Implementing continuous evaluation, safety, and learning loops for production-grade autonomy
* Defining the roadmap for agentic control systems and AI infrastructure
* Establishing research and experimentation practices that drive measurable results
Areas of Responsibility
Agentic Architecture
* Design multi-agent and hierarchical planners with tool use, memory, retrieval, and self-reflection (e.g., ReAct / Reflexion paradigms)
* Build tool-augmented agents for bidding, creative generation, analytics, and constraint solving
* Develop mechanisms for verification, recovery, and safe operation under uncertainty
Learning & Control Systems
* Apply contextual bandits and reinforcement learning for bidding and budget allocation
* Implement online learning with safety envelopes and reward shaping aligned to metrics like CPA, ROAS, and LTV
* Build autonomy guardrails: policy constraints, anomaly detection, cost caps, and human-in-the-loop controls
Evaluation & Simulation
* Create offline, shadow, and canary pipelines for iterative testing and deployment
* Develop simulators, evaluation harnesses, and red-team frameworks for robustness and drift detection
LLM Systems
* Integrate retrieval-augmented generation for keyword and creative workflows
* Apply program synthesis and prompt orchestration to coordinate complex tool plans
* Optimize for latency and cost using adapter, distillation, and caching strategies
Science to Product
* Collaborate with product and design to frame objectives, define metrics, and run experiments
* Translate research breakthroughs into capabilities customers can toggle, audit, and trust
Key Outcomes
* A production-grade agentic loop that outperforms baseline bidding and pacing models
* A hardened safety and evaluation harness with datasets, guardrails, and rollback protocols
* An LLM+tools pipeline that automates creative and keyword generation with traceable reasoning
* Clear documentation, experiment logs, and a hiring plan for future AI/ML roles
What We’re Looking For
Must-Haves
* 5–7+ years of applied ML experience with shipped systems impacting real-world KPIs
* Expert Python and hands-on PyTorch experience across training, serving, and iteration
* Proven experience in at least two of the following areas:
* Agentic LLM systems (tool use, planning, memory)
* Reinforcement learning or contextual bandits
* Retrieval and ranking
* Time-series or anomaly detection
* Causal inference or experimentation
* Strong background in statistics, experiment design, and counterfactual reasoning
* Demonstrated ability to build safe, autonomous systems aligned with business goals
Nice-to-Haves
* Experience with ads, marketplaces, or other constrained control systems
* Familiarity with distributed systems (Ray, Triton, Kafka, feature stores, vector DBs)
* Experience with FastAPI, async Python, Kubernetes, SQL, and modern data tools (DuckDB, Polars, Pandas)
* Publications or OSS contributions in agentic AI, RL, or NLP (impact > pedigree)
What Makes You Stand Out
* You love the intersection of autonomy and safety — you ship agents that act, verify, and recover
* You move seamlessly from research to production, preferring simple solutions that win over complexity
* You define rewards and objectives clearly — and defend them with data
* You’re comfortable owning architecture while writing production code daily
* You’re driven to build self-learning, self-correcting systems that scale
What’s in It for You
* A defining role shaping the intelligence core of an emerging AI company
* Direct collaboration with the founders on AI, product, and strategy
* Competitive compensation and meaningful equity
* Flexible, remote-friendly working with US/EU overlap
* A culture built on trust, experimentation, and technical excellence
Why Work With Merit
Merit connects top AI talent with high-growth, venture-backed companies — giving you direct access to founders and roles that define industries. Spend 20 minutes with Merit, and get matched with opportunities like this one that align with your experience and ambitions.
✅ Access exclusive, high-impact AI roles
✅ Fast-tracked introductions to founders and hiring managers
✅ Guidance from your personal AI recruiter, available 24/7
Ready to define the future of agentic AI systems?
Meet Merit today and get matched with roles that match your ambition and potential.
👉 Apply via Merit to learn more about this Founding Lead AI Scientist opportunity.
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