Head of AI Research
Kepler Ai
| Company | Kepler Ai |
| Category | Data & Analytics |
| Location | New York City |
| Remote | On-site (inferred) |
| Employment | Not stated |
| Level | Director |
| Salary | USD 400k–700k |
| Posted | 23 Oct 2025 |
| Last verified | 12 Aug 2026 |
| Source | Employer ATS (ashby) |
Description
INTRODUCING KEPLER
THE PROBLEM
High-stakes industries are falling behind on AI adoption. Their workflows can’t afford wrong answers. And AI can’t be trusted to give right ones because of hallucinations. The barrier isn’t that the models aren’t smart enough. It’s that no one can verify what they produce. The fix isn’t a better model, it’s a trust layer: every output traceable, every calculation auditable, every answer reproducible.
WHAT KEPLER IS
Kepler is the agent harness - the infrastructure layer that wraps around AI models to make their outputs reliable, traceable, and verifiable. The model is a replaceable component. The harness is the product.
In Kepler's architecture, the LLM orchestrates - it decides what data to gather, what to compute, how to structure the output. But every actual data point, every extracted value, every calculation flows through deterministic code pipelines. The LLM never touches the data itself. Every value carries provenance metadata back to its exact source. Every computation is auditable and reproducible. Verification loops cross-check outputs before users ever see them.
We started in finance because the stakes are highest and the tolerance for error is zero. We’ve built a finance research product that lets analysts supercharge their workflow: pulling comparables, building models and researching filings. No more double-checking every number AI spits out. Every number tracing back to the source, every time.
But the architecture - provenance, deterministic computation, verification - applies anywhere trust in AI output matters: chemicals, legal, healthcare. Models are commoditizing fast. The trust layer is what's missing and the market is massive.
THE TEAM
The founding team spent a combined 40+ years at Palantir building the type of large-scale data infrastructure that Kepler requires. Our co-founder created Palantir's first AI platform and built the analytics engine behind $100M+ contracts. Our founding engineers led Foundry's core systems - Ontology, Fusion, Workshop, FoundryML - and scaled data products at Meta to 1B+ users.
We’ve paired this deep technical foundation with a repeat founder profile. Our CEO built and scaled a data company to $15M ARR before successfully selling it. He then became Citadel's first Head of Business Engineering, experiencing first hand the problems we are now solving. We have a team who’ve been on both sides: building systems like this at massive scale and selling it into the buyers who need it most.
We’re backed by investors who built the modern AI and data stacks, plus the builders of iconic commercial businesses. This includes founders of OpenAI, Meta AI Research, MotherDuck, dbt Labs and Square as well as PebbleBed, Company Ventures and Mantis VC firms.
THE ROLE
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
You'll define the research agenda that makes AI trustworthy for enterprise decisions. At Kepler, we've solved hallucination not by making models smarter, but by architecting systems where hallucination is structurally impossible. AI interprets intent. Code retrieves data. A semantic layer connects them. Every output traces to its source.
Now we need someone to push the frontier of what's possible within this architecture.
You'll lead research across agentic systems, memory architectures, retrieval mechanisms, and evaluation frameworks. You'll have access to completely differentiated financial data: structured filings, earnings transcripts, market feeds, research reports, live audio, all normalized with full provenance. This isn't another research lab building demos. Your work ships to production, powering research workflows where financial professionals make million-dollar decisions.
This role is for researchers who want to build AI systems that actually work in high-stakes environments, where every answer must be defensible and every insight must trace back to truth.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Define the research agenda: Identify the hi