Lead AI Engineer

AI Engineer

Company Overview

The company builds causal AI systems for mission-critical industrial processes. Our flagship platform accelerates Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in semiconductor manufacturing, cutting investigation cycles from weeks to hours.

Job Summary

The person will own the company’s entire technical AI vision—from foundational research to production deployment. This role involves architecting the next generation of our causal AI platform, managing and growing an AI research team, and serving as the primary scientific voice with enterprise customers and investors. You will report directly to the CEO.

Responsibilities

• Research & Platform Leadership:

• Define and execute the multi-year AI research roadmap for causal inference, Bayesian networks, and multivariate time-series anomaly detection in semiconductor manufacturing.
• Lead the architecture of the core RCA engine: causal graph construction, alarm correlation, and automated hypothesis generation from heterogeneous manufacturing data (tool logs, sensor streams, SPC charts, Jira tickets).
• Drive innovations in few-shot and zero-shot transfer for new manufacturing nodes and equipment types.
• Publish and protect intellectual property through patents and peer-reviewed research at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, KDD, DATE).
• Evaluate and integrate emerging techniques in large language models (LLMs), graph neural networks, and continual learning.

• Product & Engineering Partnership:

• Collaborate with engineering to translate research prototypes into production-grade microservices (Python, C++, containerized deployments on Azure Stack Hub and on-premises environments).
• Set machine learning (ML) engineering standards: training pipelines, model versioning, A/B evaluation frameworks, and human-in-the-loop feedback loops.
• Own model quality metrics and drive continuous improvement against customer-defined KPIs (e.g., Subject Matter Expert (SME) win rate, Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) reduction).

• Customer & Commercial AI:

• Partner with enterprise customers to define AI requirements, validate causal models against SME ground truth, and present results to C-suite stakeholders.
• Support pilots and Proof of Concepts (POCs) with deep technical expertise, including live demos, data deep-dives, and custom model tuning.
• Contribute to Requests for Proposals (RFPs), technical sections of contracts, and AI capability positioning for sales cycles.

• Team Building:

• Hire, mentor, and retain a world-class team of AI researchers and ML engineers.
• Establish a culture of scientific rigor, rapid experimentation, and customer obsession.
• Represent the company in recruiting at top-tier universities and industry conferences.

Qualifications

• Must-Have:

• MS or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Statistics, or a closely related field.
• 5+ years of post-PhD experience building and shipping ML/AI systems in production.
• Deep expertise in causal inference, probabilistic graphical models, or time-series analysis.
• Strong publication record at top-tier ML or data engineering venues.
• Proven ability to lead technical teams of 5+ researchers/engineers.
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers on AI adoption.
• Excellent written and verbal communication with the ability to translate research to business impact.

• Strong Plus:

• Experience in semiconductor manufacturing, process control, or advanced industrial automation.
• Background in LLM fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or agentic AI for knowledge-intensive domains.
• Patent portfolio or prior intellectual property development experience.
• Track record of winning competitive POCs or ML benchmarks against incumbent solutions.

Experience

• 5+ years of post-PhD experience in ML/AI systems relevant to semiconductor manufacturing.

Environment

• Work in a dynamic environment with a focus on innovation in AI technology, collaborating closely with engineering teams and enterprise clients.

Salary

• Salary information is not specified.

Growth Opportunities

• Opportunities for career advancement within ThirdAI as the company expands its AI capabilities and industry impact.

Benefits

• Benefits information is not specified.