Head of Artificial Intelligence (PhD/Research Experience)

About Museigen

Museigen is building Quantum-Enhanced Cognitive AI for mission-critical operations in defence, aerospace, enterprise software, and critical infrastructure. Lives, sovereignty, and competitive operational continuity depend on the decisions our systems power. Our cognitive engine, Merlin Cortex, turns overwhelming complexity into decisive action where reliability is non-negotiable and decisions cannot wait.

We are headquartered in Bengaluru and operate under the philosophy of "Make in India, Deploy for the World." The team is small, the publication record is real, and the deployments are live.

The Role

The Head of Artificial Intelligence sets technical direction for Museigen's AI stack - the systems that let Merlin Cortex remember, reason, and coordinate at the speed and reliability that enterprise-grade and mission-critical operations demand. Knowledge representation, retrieval, agent orchestration, model routing, and evaluation all live under your remit. You report to the CEO.

This is a builder-researcher role. You will write specifications, you will write code, and you will own production outcomes. You will hire the people who help you do it.

What You Will Own

• Architecture and research direction for the knowledge and agent systems that power our products.
• Build-versus-buy decisions across the AI stack: graph stores, inference runtimes, agent frameworks, evaluation harnesses.
• Evaluation regimes that hold our systems honest against shipped reality, not benchmarks of convenience.
• Technical hiring and team building for AI engineering and research.
• A working partnership with the CEO on technical strategy and intellectual property posture.

What You Bring

Required

• A research foundation. PhD in artificial intelligence, machine learning, knowledge representation, NLP, graph learning, or a closely adjacent field, or equivalent depth demonstrated through peer-reviewed publication and shipped systems.
• 4 to 8 years total experience, including at least one full cycle of taking research-grade ideas into production.
• Working depth in several of: knowledge graph systems, graph-based learning, retrieval-augmented generation, agent frameworks, multi-agent orchestration, model routing, evaluation methodology, computer vision and multimodal perception.
• LLM systems engineering experience. Production exposure to inference runtimes, agent SDKs, and evaluation harnesses.
• Python and distributed systems fluency. You write the code that goes into production, not the slides that wrap it.
• Written and verbal communication. You can produce a research note, a technical specification, and a customer-facing explanation, and you know which is which.
• A serious view on responsible AI in high-stakes domains. You think clearly about failure modes, accountability, and the line between automation and human decision-making.

Bonus

• Publications at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, VLDB, or similar venues.
• Open-source contributions to widely used AI infrastructure.
• Experience working at scale with AI-assisted development tooling.
• Familiarity with both Indian and global enterprise AI markets.

Who You Are

• Hungry. You see a window and you want to be the one who closes it.
• Young in mindset, regardless of age. Comfort with ambiguity. Allergic to process theatre.
• Direct. You surface uncomfortable truths and push back when you disagree, including with the founder.
• High agency. You reduce the founder's bottlenecks rather than add to them.
• Builder-researcher. You read papers and you ship code. The distinction is uninteresting to you.
• Symmetrically sceptical. Same standard for competitor claims and for your own latest result. Shipped reality wins; announcements do not count.

What This Role Is Not

• A research-only seat. We publish; we also ship.
• A vendor-management role. You write code and own production outcomes.
• A strategy-only seat. Strategy without architecture is theatre here.
• Slow-moving. Museigen is shipping into environments where latency costs lives.

What We Offer

• A direct line to the founder. No middle layer.
• Tooling and compute matched to the work, not to a procurement calendar.
• Compensation: competitive base plus meaningful equity.
• Bengaluru-based with hybrid flexibility. Remote considered for exceptional candidates.

How to Apply

1. Email the following with the subject "My application for the Head of AI at Museigen" to prakhar@museigen.ai:

• Your CV/Rsum/LinkedIn + GitHub or Research Profile (Scholar or others).
• Links to two or three primary outputs that show your work. Papers, theses, in-depth technical writing, or open-source projects. Marketing decks do not count.
• A short note (a paragraph is enough) covering one production system you have shipped, what you learned from getting it wrong before getting it right, and why this role interests you.

2. Follow the Museigen LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/company/museigen-ai/) for updates on this role, and more roles opening in the next week.

We read every application. We respond within four working days.