Join Us: Lightcone Research Is Hiring in Berkeley and Paris
We are hiring our first three Members of Technical Staff, based in Berkeley and Paris, to build the open-source infrastructure for rigorous AI-assisted science.
By Lightcone Research
Agentic AI is about to transform how science is done.We are hiring the founding engineers who will shape the open infrastructure that keeps it rigorous.
Lightcone Research’s mission is to build the infrastructure for a new era of research, in which agentic AI enables scientists to tackle more ambitious problems without sacrificing rigor or confidence in their results. At its core, we are reimagining the scientific record: representing analyses as structured, extensible research objects that make the reasoning and provenance behind their results explicit.
Around this foundation, we are building the infrastructure to support modern scientific workflows, imagining the future of agent-researcher interactions, and laying the groundwork for a shared corpus of scientific results that can be trusted and extended.
We laid out this vision in Science that Compounds — and in July we started building it, gathering 35 scientists and builders (spanning astrophysics, neuroscience, medical imaging, chemistry and metabolomics, geophysics, biology, theoretical physics, statistics, and data science) at our first AAI4Science Developer Summit to lay the foundations for an open-source ecosystem of AI-powered tools that support rigorous scientific research.
Our team combines tenured scientific leadership with deep expertise in research software and open science. In the United States, we are hosted by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) at UC Berkeley; in France, by the AISSAI Center (AI for Science and Science for AI) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). We are supported by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, and advised by leaders in astrophysics, machine learning for science, high-performance computing, and open-source research infrastructure.
The three roles
While the three roles are distinct, they belong to a single team, where every voice counts and everyone contributes at every level, from technical solutions to team culture. Joining now means real ownership of the abstractions, tools, and norms that will define Lightcone Research.
Berkeley, CA$104,600 – $154,500Apply
Member of Technical Staff, Product Engineer
Invent how scientists actually work with research agents: how they scope problems, steer long-running work, understand progress and uncertainty, inspect results, intervene when needed, and ultimately trust what gets produced.
Berkeley, CA$104,600 – $154,500Apply
Member of Technical Staff, Research Software Engineer
Build the underlying infrastructure for agentic science: open specifications, agentic tooling, evaluation systems, scientific workflows, HPC integration, provenance, and reproducibility.
Paris, France€60,000 – €90,000Apply
Member of Technical Staff, Research Engineer
A broad, founding role spanning agentic systems, scientific infrastructure, and the researcher experience — building the European side of Lightcone Research.
Where you’ll work
The Berkeley roles are based at the UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science, in the brand-new Bakar Gateway building at the heart of UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, surrounded by scientists, statisticians, and open-source engineers building the Scientific Python and Jupyter ecosystems.
Our Paris team is based in the city itself, working closely with our CNRS AISSAI colleagues and the French scientific community across disciplines — from fundamental physics to biology and beyond.
Come build this with us
You don’t need to tick every box.
Great candidates come from software engineering as much as from scientific research. We would rather talk with you and figure out together whether the role is a fit than see you rule yourself out from the start.
The postings above have the full details on each role and how to apply. If you’re not sure which role fits, or you have questions about the project, write to us at info@lightconeresearch.org. We would love to hear from you.