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 reasoningOntology design, ontology evolution or semantic modellingKnowledge graphs, semantic graphs or concept graphsRDF, OWL, SHACL, SPARQL, linked data or semantic web technologiesAutomated reasoning, description logic, logic programming, Datalog, Prolog or rule-based systemsNeurosymbolic AI or hybrid neural-symbolic architecturesLLMs grounded in structured knowledgeGraphRAG, semantic retrieval or knowledge-grounded generationAgent memory, persistent memory or cognitive architecturesAI planning, constraint reasoning or temporal reasoningProvenance, explainability, traceability or trustworthy AIEntity resolution, information extraction, knowledge discovery or semantic data integrationYou 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 RoleFounding-level ownership over the core intelligence architectureMeaningful equityWork directly with highly technical foundersEarly commercial traction already in placeBuild core IP rather than peripheral AI featuresShape the technical directionOpportunity to build the team around your domain as the company scalesIf this sounds like your kind of problem, I’d love to chat.adam@zebrapeople.com