Website:
ethara.ai
Job details:
Job Description: Head of Research
Research at Ethara turns open problems into shipped, reproducible results. We run a pod-based research function under a shared agenda, and every delivery team draws on that depth through its attached researcher. You will own that engine end to end.
1. Role Details
- Title: Head of Research
- Vertical: Research
- Reporting to: CTO
- Years of Experience: 10-15 years
2. Team and Mission
Ethara Research works in pods under a shared agenda. Research Leads (R4 to R5) run the pods; researchers and research engineers (R3 to R5) staff them. The Head of Research is the vertical's single point of contact and named gatekeeper: research agenda owner, hiring authority, external interface, and final offer sign-off. The role holds the Principal Investigator (PI) responsibility for the vertical bar, spanning ethics review, dataset and compute governance, training-run governance, peer review, and publication approval.
3. Role Mission
Your goal is to achieve these outcomes in your first 6 to 12 months:
- Publish and defend a 2 to 3 year research agenda that aligns pod roadmaps with Ethara's product and delivery direction.
- Run the full research hiring loop as PI (research-taste interviews, job talks, advisor reference calls) and grow the vertical to plan without lowering the bar.
- Take at least one flagship research claim from idea through ethics review, tracked experiments, peer review, and publication approval to public release.
4. Responsibilities
- Own the research agenda: choose the problems worth working on, prune the ones that are not, and defend the trade-offs to the leadership team.
- Run the Research Leads with a shallow reporting chain, pod-level bars, and day-to-day review discipline per the research lifecycle.
- Hold the PI responsibility: chair ethics review, sign off training-run and dataset governance, and gate peer review and publication approval.
- Own the hiring bar for R3 to R5: conduct research-taste interviews and advisor reference calls personally, call consensus in calibration, and sign every offer.
- Represent Ethara Research externally through conference presence, collaborations, open-source releases, and advisor-network sourcing, while stewarding compute and research budget allocation across pods.
5. Must-have Qualifications
- 10 to 15 years of research experience spanning academia and industry, with a record of leading research teams or groups.
- PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a closely related field.
- First-author publications at tier-1 venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, CVPR, or equivalent) and evidence of setting, not just meeting, a publication bar.
- Working exposure to Python and the modern ML research stack (PyTorch or JAX, experiment tracking, reproducible pipelines); you must be able to read a pod's code and challenge its methodology.
- Demonstrated hiring judgement: you have built a research team, run reference calls, and made hard no-hire calls.
6. Nice-to-have Qualifications
- Experience governing training runs, dataset provenance, or research ethics processes at an AI lab or research-driven company.
- Open-source research artifacts with sustained community adoption.
- Prior PI or grant-holding experience, or service as an area chair or senior reviewer at a tier-1 venue.
7. Success @ 6 Months
We measure your success by these metrics:
- Research agenda published, reviewed by leadership, and each pod's roadmap traceable to it.
- Time-to-fill for R3 to R4 roles inside the 45 to 75 day target, with calibration variance within 1 Likert point on 80% of scored dimensions.
- At least one work item through the full lifecycle gate (ethics review, peer review, publication approval) with reproducibility artifacts filed.
9. Location and Work Arrangement
- Location: Gurugram, Haryana, India (remote-first)
- Work Model: On-Site (5 days working)
Click on Apply to know more.
