Vice President, AI Research

About Nscale

Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers.  Nscale enables AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development. Our GPU cloud bolsters technical capabilities and directly supports strategic business outcomes, including cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility.

We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As an Nscaler, you’ll build trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. If you join our team, you’ll be contributing to building the technology that powers the future.

About The Role (Job Purpose)

We are seeking a Vice President of AI Research to establish and lead our internal AI research lab. The role reports directly to the Chief Product Officer (CPO) and will ensure the research agenda is tightly aligned with feature delivery and customer impact. This leader will define the research strategy, architect the software stack, and ensure breakthroughs ship as production-ready capabilities for our enterprise AI cloud platform.

This role will work closely with the VP of AI Applications to translate research into productised offerings and to differentiate and expand our token-as-a-service offerings.

What You'll Be Doing

• Hire, mentor and inspire a world-class team working on efficient foundation models, compiler/runtime optimisation and novel training paradigms.
• Marry sparsity, quantisation and mixture-of-experts approaches with low-level kernel innovations to optimize inference for customers.
• Represent Nscale in top-tier venues, open-source conferences, committees, and guide the company’s long-term technical direction, in translating SOTA into Products and platform capabilities.
• Establishing a data-driven applied-research culture to accelerate the path to Product.
• Collaborate with Product, Marketing, Data-Centre and AI Applications teams to convert research into differentiated customer offerings.
• Speak at conferences, influence standards bodies, and cultivate partnerships that reinforce Nscale’s reputation for technical leadership.

About You (Skills / Qualifications)

• 10+ years’ experience leading applied research or advanced engineering teams in AI, HPC or large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven track record of delivering novel machine-learning models and the infrastructure that powers them at petascale; experience in saturating 5,000+ GPU clusters is highly desirable.
• Deep expertise in high-performance networking (InfiniBand, RoCE, NVSwitch) and kernel-level optimisation (eBPF, RDMA, CUDA-level profiling).
• Author or co-author of peer-reviewed publications in efficient LLMs, model compression or systems for ML; open-source contributions to relevant projects.
• Strong people-leadership skills, with evidence of building inclusive, high-performing, geographically distributed teams.
• Fluency in Python and C/C++, plus hands-on familiarity with PyTorch, DeepSpeed/FSDP and modern compiler stacks (Triton, TVM, MLIR/IREE or similar).
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management abilities; comfortable briefing executives and external customers.

Nice to have

• Experience turning research outputs into commercial cloud or SaaS products.
• Direct contributions to standards or open-source frameworks in the AI or HPC ecosystem.
• Practical experience developing kernel/runtime collections, dispatch systems, or LUT/Tuning-based kernel libraries for efficient inference/training.
• Expertise in sustainability programmes for data-centre operations (e.g., heat re-use, grid optimisation).
• Security-aware mindset that creates secure-by-design solutions as they get implemented in a cloud-based, multi-tenant environment.

What We Can Offer You

At Nscale, you'll find a collaborative, supportive, and innovative environment where your contributions spark real impact. We're building something extraordinary, and we want you at the core.

• Highly competitive package (base + equity) with reviews every 12 months. 🚀
• Join the fastest-growing tech startup, your chance to push boundaries, collaborate with brilliant minds, and make your mark on cutting-edge AI. ✨
• Expect a dynamic progression plan tailored to your ambitions. Grow by trying new things, leading, challenging the status quo, and owning your impact, always with our full support. 
• Human-First Flexibility: We treat you as humans first. 🫶🏽 Our flexible workplace trusts Nscalers to deliver, giving you the autonomy to shape your day around life's moments.
• Join our thriving remote-first team. Geography is no barrier to impact or connection. We build seamless virtual collaboration, empowering you, wherever you work.

Equal Opportunities Statement

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

The responsibilities outlined in this job description are not exhaustive and are intended to provide a general overview of the position. The employee may be required to perform additional duties, tasks, and responsibilities as assigned by management, consistent with the skills and qualifications required for the role.

For information on how Nscale handles candidate personal data, please see our Employee & Candidate Privacy Notice: Here.