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EdgeRunner AI is a Series-A startup on a mission to bring state-of-the-art AI to the tactical edge, enabling warfighters to make better decisions faster, synthesize diverse data streams, and interact with robotic platforms using natural language. The company specializes in the full stack—from model training and experimentation to productized AI deployment in harsh field conditions. Data security is built in by design: models run on-device, so sensitive information never leaves the platform.
As a Research Scientist, you will join the EdgeRunner Research organization to train models, evaluate AI systems and harnesses, and deliver world-class AI capabilities to the warfighter. You will conduct thousands of experiments to improve model performance, working on specialized models tailored to specific military occupational specialties (MOS/AFSC) and platform needs. The role involves aggressive quantization, distillation, and compression techniques to achieve frontier-level performance on edge devices.
The team values initiative, ownership, and independence. You will be expected to understand how business objectives translate into technical solutions, interact directly with customers, and operate comfortably with ambiguity. Though collaborative, every researcher is a self-starter and project owner.
EdgeRunner offers 100% remote-first work (US-based), competitive salary and equity, fully covered health/dental/vision for employees, 401K, unlimited PTO, and IT equipment stipends.
REQUIREMENTS:
- U.S. citizenship (required by federal law for security clearance eligibility)
- Eligible to obtain TS/SCI clearance; active clearance strongly preferred
- Experience in one or more of: reinforcement learning, large-scale data ablations, pretraining/midtraining, vision model training, multimodal training, machine translation, multilingual modeling, benchmark development, robotic LLM integration, or blind model adaptation
- PhD in a relevant field preferred; relevant research experience from industry, military, or government also considered
- Track record of taking initiative, understanding business-to-technical translation, customer interaction capability, and comfort with ambiguity
