🇫🇷 Paris, France · 5h ago
Member of Technical Staff, Research Engineer (H/F)
Lightcone Research
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Our 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 by 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 foundations for a shared corpus of scientific results that can be trusted and extended.Based at UC Berkeley and CNRS in Paris, our team is embedded in some of the world’s leading research institutions, supported by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, and advised by leading scientists and prominent figures in open source.About the RoleAs a Member of the Technical Staff, you’ll contribute wherever your strengths have the greatest impact, across every level of our work: from the design of ASTRA (our open specification for describing scientific analyses), to new paradigms for how scientists interact with agentic systems, to the integration of our agentic stack with high-performance computing facilities. You will work side by side with scientists from CNRS and UC Berkeley to understand the scientific workflows specific to various disciplines, identify the limitations of current agentic systems, and turn those needs into open-source software and standards.You will join a small team (fewer than ten people) where your voice will count and where you can contribute actively at every level, from technical solutions to team culture. As one of the first members of the technical staff, you will play a critical role in innovating, proposing ideas, and shaping our collective adventure.This fixed-term position (CDD), based in Paris, is offered for an initial duration of one year.What you'll doTake ownership of key components of the Lightcone Research Stack. At Lightcone Research, this ownership is vertical: you will drive each component in your care, from technical direction and architecture through implementation, deployment, user feedback, and long-term maintenance.Collaborate with world-class scientific teams to identify friction points in our agentic suite and turn those limitations into better abstractions, features, and infrastructure.Sustain our open-source ecosystem together with the rest of the team: designing well-crafted APIs, writing documentation, reviewing code, triaging issues, and supporting external contributors.This role is for you if you…thrive in environments with a high degree of autonomy and responsibility, and enjoy tackling open-ended problems;know the world of scientific research, understand its methods and practices, and want to help move science forward;have designed, integrated, or evaluated agentic AI systems, and/or are eager to do so in the context of scientific research;bring a product mindset: listening to users' needs, understanding and anticipating them, and prioritizing what truly delivers value;build solutions (software, infrastructure) that ship to production, with careful attention to detail and strong technical rigor;work comfortably in a multidisciplinary team spanning science and engineering;share the values of open source and open science.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 strongest profiles will stand out throughdeep experience in a data-intensive, computational scientific field (astronomy, physics, genomics, climate science, neuroscience…);having created or maintained widely used open-source software, and/or experience growing a community of developers;experience with HPC systems and their tooling (e.g., SLURM, Apptainer/Singularity), scientific workflow tools (e.g., Snakemake, CWL, Nextflow), and containerization and orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).About Lightcone ResearchLightcone Research is an open-source initiative building the foundations of AI-assisted science that is reproducible, composable, and verifiable. We are hosted, in France, by the AISSAI Center (AI for Science and Science for AI, UAR2036) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and, in the United States, by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) at UC Berkeley. This project is made possible by the support of Eric and Wendy Schmidt.The AISSAI Center is the CNRS entity dedicated to AI for science and science for AI, with a mission to structure and coordinate cross-cutting initiatives involving every scientific discipline at the interface with AI, from fundamental physics to biology to the humanities and social sciences. BIDS plays a similar role at UC Berkeley: a central hub for data science and open scientific software, connected across the entire campus, from the physical and life sciences to the humanities and social sciences. This dual anchoring places us at the heart of exchanges with a wide range of academic communities and gives us privileged access to the open-source communities based in Berkeley (from Jupyter to Scientific Python).Sourced from LinkedIn. Relocantly aggregates public job postings; apply on the original site.