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Osmo is a digital olfaction company building the first computer that can smell. Olfactory Intelligence (OI) is the proprietary model suite that predicts how molecules and mixtures will smell, generates new formulas from creative briefs, and powers commercial products for major consumer goods companies. The OI system is trained on 5.4M+ human sniff annotations, 100M+ mass spectral readings, and a molecule library in the billions—data no competitor possesses.
You will lead the Applied AI team as Head of Applied AI, reporting directly to the CTO. This is a hands-on leadership role at a ~100-person company where you will own the full ML/AI organization, from research to production. Your responsibilities include:
- Lead and grow the OI team of ML engineers and research scientists across formulation, prediction, and generative models; hire, level, and set review standards.
- Set the model roadmap: decide what to double down on, retire, or merge across brief-to-formula generation, reformulation, cost optimization, molecule generation, deformulation, odor prediction, and per-customer property models.
- Own the OI benchmark suite, including internal quality gates, contractual acceptance criteria, and model cards for customers and investors.
- Deliver on enterprise commitments with hard accuracy gates and quarterly dates; flag targets that are out of reach early and clearly.
- Run the data flywheel with Sensory Science and Fragrance Development to design experiments, define annotation protocols, and set KPIs that convert panel time into model gains.
- Ship models to production in partnership with Software Platform and Product Engineering, handling versioning, monitoring, and drift.
- Stay hands-on: read diffs, challenge eval design, run experiments yourself.
- Make hard cuts to kill good work and make room for essential work, explained with kindness and clarity.
- Partner daily with Chemistry, perfumers, and evaluators to ground model output in what people actually smell.
- Define and hold the bar for excellent applied ML at Osmo.
You will work in a hybrid schedule, 3 days per week in the Elizabeth, NJ office. Osmo provides complimentary shuttle service from Brooklyn and Newark, NJ.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of industry ML/AI experience in an applied or research capacity, with models shipped to real users (not only papers or prototypes).
- Proven people leadership: have managed, hired, leveled, and grown ML engineers or research scientists; team lead experience with real ownership counts.
- Deep expertise in at least one of: generative models over structured or discrete objects, molecular or chemical ML, multi-modal representation learning, LLM systems and evaluation, or Bayesian and experimental design. Breadth across several is a strong plus.
- Rigorous on evaluation: ask what the baseline is, whether the test set leaked, and whether the metric moved for the assumed reason.
- Production-minded: have owned models in production and understand the real costs of versioning, monitoring, drift, and on-call.
- Energized by small, noisy, expensive data and by extracting maximum value from hard-won human perceptual labels rather than internet-scale data.
- Tenacious and kind: hold a high bar, stay with hard problems, and lead with candor and care.
- Hands-on: still read diffs and run experiments; at this company size, a leader who cannot do the work cannot lead it.
STAND-OUT QUALIFICATIONS:
- Science background in chemistry, chemoinformatics, sensory science, or biology.
- Experience in enterprise or contract-research settings where you owned model deliverables for outside partners.
- Experience standing up an ML platform or eval infrastructure from scratch.
