Frontier AI Lead Boston (Hybrid) | $400k base + excellent equity (seed stage)

This Frontier AI Lead role in Boston hands a frontier-lab-calibre researcher the keys to a seed-stage company — $400k base plus excellent equity.

Obi-Wan Kenobi: "That's no moon. It's a space station."

Ever wished you could take everything you learned at a frontier lab and point it at one of the hardest, most fascinating problems in science, with a blank whiteboard and a serious budget? Here's your shot.

A well-funded, stealth-mode AI startup, founded out of several of the world's top research universities and institutes, is hiring a Senior AI Leader to own its entire AI research agenda. The company sits at the intersection of frontier AI and fundamental science, and this hire decides how frontier-grade models and agents get built, trained, and scaled. From scratch. Your call.

The split is roughly 60% hands-on research and engineering, 40% leadership and strategy. Translation: you still get to train models and argue about architectures, but you also get to build the team and the culture around you. If you've shipped AI-for-Science work at a frontier lab and you're itching to run your own show with real ownership and meaningful equity, keep reading.

What You'll Do as Frontier AI Lead

Set and drive the AI research roadmap across foundation models, reinforcement learning, and agentic systems

Stay deep in the code: architect models, design training schemes, and prototype new agent behaviours alongside brilliant domain scientists and engineers

Build the training infrastructure and evaluation frameworks that let AI systems generate, test, and validate results at scale

Recruit and lead a world-class team of AI researchers and engineers, and set a high bar they'll be proud to clear

Shape how the org runs: project selection, experimentation, code review, cross-team collaboration

Be the voice on AI internally, guiding technical trade-offs and long-term architecture decisions

Partner with the founders to align AI strategy with company milestones and big scientific ambitions

You Might Be Our Person If...

You're at (or recently left) a frontier AI lab like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google DeepMind, ideally with shipped AI-for-Science work. Other frontier labs considered case by case

You know modern ML cold: foundation-model pretraining, RL (PPO/SAC-style methods, self-play, or similar), large-scale optimisation, and distributed multi-GPU/multi-node training (CUDA, NCCL, the works)

You've managed and grown small, high-performing research or engineering teams, and enjoyed it

You can take a wildly ambitious goal and break it into projects a team can actually execute

You have a strong background in physics, maths, or the hard sciences. Pivoted from hard science into AI recently? Even better, we love a good origin story

You're happy in the trenches with domain scientists, debating benchmarks, evaluation harnesses, and what "valid" really means

Bonus points: scientific ML (physics-informed neural networks, neural PDE solvers, differentiable simulation, surrogate modelling), experience wiring models into large-scale simulations or complex simulators, or familiarity with export-control and safety considerations around advanced AI.

The Practical Bits of this Frontier AI Lead role

Location: Boston, hybrid in-person. East Coast (e.g., NYC) works if you'll be in the Boston office at least monthly; West Coast works if you're up for relocating. Relocation support on the table

Compensation: ~$400k base plus 3–5% equity at the seed stage, with competitive benefits. Yes, that equity number is real

Work authorisation: US citizenship or green card strongly preferred; sponsorship considered case by case for exceptional candidates

Note: This role is subject to US national-security and export-control requirements, which may limit eligibility for some candidates

Why this Frontier AI Lead opportunity is different

Most Frontier AI Lead titles are decoration on a management job. This one is the real thing: you set the research direction, you choose the stack, and the equity means you share properly in the upside. A Frontier AI Lead at seed stage shapes everything that comes after — the hires, the culture, the science. Big Wave Digital is running this Frontier AI Lead search directly with the founders; talk to us confidentially and we will brief you on the funding, the roadmap and the team before you commit to anything. If you have been waiting for the right Frontier AI Lead move out of a frontier lab, apply now — this search will move quickly.