R-01 · RACD
RESEARCHLEADS THE FUNCTION
Founding Research Lead, RACD
The hardest problem in the group, and the person who decides what we work on and what we stop working on.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£340,000 to £620,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
1.00% to 1.50% of RACD
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
Everyone collects everything and outages still cascade, because correlation was always the constraint rather than instrumentation. RACD is trying to recognise a bearing vibration, a queue depth and a latency shoulder as one event with one cause, at a false-positive rate low enough that an engineer acts on the alarm at 03:00 without opening a laptop first. That is a question about causality before it is a question about engineering.
You would set the research agenda: which formulations we pursue, which we kill, what counts as a result, and how a result gets from a notebook to something serving traffic. You would also hire the scientists and engineers underneath you, which is the part most research leads discover they have to do and would rather not. Here it is stated up front.
More on the company itself: RACD →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Your first week is reading rather than shipping. Every open line of the agenda, the experiments that failed and why, the customer estates we hold telemetry from, and the two formulations currently competing for attention. By the end of it we would expect a written view on which one you would kill, and nobody will be precious about the answer.
A normal Tuesday starts with a long uninterrupted block, because this work does not survive being sliced into thirty-minute pieces. Then a review with a scientist whose result is not holding up, a conversation with the machine learning engineer about whether a formulation is servable at all, and an hour on hiring, which is a permanent line in your week rather than a phase you get through. One written memo a week, and the founder reads it.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
Python across the research surface, and whatever the correlation engine turns out to want underneath it: Rust and Go are both in the building and we have deliberately not standardised. Cluster and GPU budget is yours without asking. We are unusually unattached to particular tools and very attached to a result being reproducible by somebody who was not there.
We do not screen on tools. Nothing above is a requirement, and a stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work. If you have gone deep in something else and would arrive with a view about why half of this is the wrong choice, that is an argument we would like to have.
03
What you would own
Not a ticket queue and not a slice of somebody else’s roadmap. Four things with your name against them in the decision log, from the first fortnight.
01
The agenda
What we work on, in what order, and the written case for each.
02
The bar
You define what counts as a result, and you say when something is not resolving.
03
The team
You hire the researchers on this venture, with a budget and no requisition committee.
04
The path to production
A model nobody can serve is half an answer. You own the half that survives contact.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸A body of work in causal inference, time-series, anomaly detection, information theory or a neighbouring field, that somebody hostile has read carefully and failed to break
- ▸You have set research direction, whether formally as a lead or informally as the person the group followed
- ▸You can state in advance, in writing, what would make you stop a line of work
- ▸You have hired researchers or engineers and closed them against other offers
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸A doctorate. Common on this team, and genuinely not required: we have hired both ways
- ▸Exposure to industrial telemetry, grids, manufacturing, or large distributed estates
- ▸Published work with your name on it that people outside your institution have argued with
- ▸You have taken a research result all the way to something serving live traffic
Nothing in the preferred column is a filter, and neither list is applied before a human reads you. No degree is required for anything on this page, and we have hired people with doctorates and people with no degree at all into the same rooms. If you meet most of the minimum and not all of it, write anyway and say in the first paragraph which part you do not meet.
05
Pay, and everything around it
£340,000 to £620,000 base, plus 1.00% to 1.50% of RACD, reviewed upward annually without you having to ask. The band is published here rather than discovered three conversations in, and the offer is the same whether or not you negotiate, because the band is the band.
Everything else is what the whole group gets and is not negotiated per offer: a holiday floor rather than a ceiling, health and dental and vision for your family, sixteen to twenty weeks of parental leave for every parent, a funded setup, monthly paid group meetups somewhere in the world, one required funded trip abroad each year, a protected day a week on the research ventures, and no non-competes.
The full list, the salary band chart and the visa sponsorship map are on the careers page. We sponsor without qualification across seventeen jurisdictions and publish exactly which.
06
Apply for this role
Four steps: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, one real problem drawn from work we are genuinely doing, a working session on your solution, and a decision within a week of that session. The problem is paid if it runs long, and you keep the work either way.