Embedded Researcher

Who we are:

Percepta's mission is to transform critical institutions with applied AI. We care that industries that power the world (e.g. healthcare, manufacturing, energy) benefit from frontier technology. To make that happen, we embed with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation. We bring together:

• Forward-deployed expertise in engineering, product, and research

• Mosaic, our in-house toolkit for rapidly deploying agentic workflows

• Strategic partnerships with Anthropic, McKinsey, AWS, companies within the General Catalyst portfolio, and more

Our team is a quickly growing group of Applied AI Engineers, Embedded Product Managers and Researchers motivated by diffusing the promise of AI into improvements we can feel in our day to day lives.

Percepta is a direct partnership with General Catalyst, a global transformation and investment company.

About the role:

As an Embedded Research Engineer/Scientist at Percepta, you will advance the frontier of AI research while working directly with customers to drive real-world impact. You will work on post-training, reinforcement learning, agentic modeling, and specialized architectures but with a focus on translating research breakthroughs into production systems that transform how critical industries operate.

Unlike traditional research roles, you will be embedded with customers, working closely with their teams to understand business problems, design research strategies that address real needs, and rapidly iterate based on feedback from the field. You'll partner with our Embedded Product Managers, Research Product Managers and Applied AI Engineers to ensure your research creates measurable value and gets deployed into production.

What you'll do:

• Work directly with customers to identify high-impact research problems at the intersection of frontier AI capabilities and critical business needs.

• Design and execute research strategies across LLM post-training, RL, agentic modeling, and specialized model development that address customer-specific challenges.

• Prototype and scale training pipelines, experiment with model architectures, optimization techniques, and post-training strategies with rapid iteration cycles based on customer feedback.

• Conduct customer-facing evaluations at scale that demonstrate clear business value and drive adoption of AI systems in production environments.

• Translate ambiguous business problems into concrete research questions, and translate research outcomes back into actionable insights for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Partner closely with Applied AI Engineers to transition successful research ideas into robust, production-ready features of our Mosaic platform.

• Build trusted relationships with customer technical teams and executives, helping them understand how cutting-edge research can solve their specific problems.

• Contribute to infrastructure for high-performance distributed training and establish reusable patterns that accelerate future research and deployment.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Have an MS/PhD in Computer Science, ML, a related field, or equivalent experience.

• Have depth in LLM and ML fundamentals.

• Are comfortable implementing and debugging large-scale ML systems.

• Can work directly with customers: translate business problems into research problems, communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders, and iterate based on customer feedback.

• Motivated by seeing your research deployed in production and creating value in critical industries including healthcare, supply chains, energy, and finance.

• Have a proven track record of execution.

• Are an excellent communicator with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Enjoy extreme ownership and bringing structure to evolving requirements.

• Are passionate about AI's transformative potential and bridging the gap between research and real-world deployment.

We're working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won't be easy but it will likely be the most fulfilling work of your career. If that excites you, let's chat, even if you don't meet all of the qualifications above.