R-02 · RACD
RESEARCHFounding Research Scientist, RACD
The right answer may be a result rather than a sprint, and we would rather hire the person who can find the result.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
2
2 of them, and we will take both if both are right.
BASE SALARY
£240,000 to £420,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.60% to 1.20% of RACD
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
Metrics, logs, traces, sensors, tickets, and telemetry from machines nobody has logged into in years. The work is to build a causal correlation structure across signal that shares no schema, no clock and frequently no owner, at a cardinality where the conventional answers stop being computable.
The bar is uncomfortable on purpose: near-zero false positives, vanishingly few false negatives, because an alarm that has to be double-checked is not an alarm. Most of what you try will not clear it, and saying so early is part of the job rather than a failure of it.
More on the company itself: RACD →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Week one you are given a question, a slice of real telemetry from a live estate, and no obligation to produce anything except a written statement of what you think the problem actually is. Nobody will ask you for a timeline in the first month, because a timeline on this work would be a fiction we all quietly agreed to.
A normal Tuesday is mostly uninterrupted. One shared review where somebody tries hard to break your latest result, an occasional pull into a conversation about whether something is implementable, and otherwise your own problem. The protected research day is real and meetings are banned on it. Papers get drafted in work hours rather than at weekends.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
Python, numpy and scipy, whichever of the deep learning frameworks you reach for, and a great deal of time in a notebook against a columnar store full of real telemetry. If a result needs a language nobody here writes, write it in that and tell us why.
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
A question
One line of the research agenda, yours, with your name in the decision log.
02
The evidence
Experiments designed so that a negative result is still worth having.
03
The paper
You publish, your name is on it, and a day a week is protected for it.
04
The handover
What survives goes to the engineers who will serve it, and you stay for that conversation.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸Depth in something real: physics, mathematics, statistics, machine learning, information theory, signal processing. The field matters far less than whether you have been to the bottom of one
- ▸A thesis, preprint, paper or result you can defend against somebody trying hard to break it
- ▸You can write. Most of what you produce here is read before it is run
- ▸Working Python, or demonstrated ability to pick it up fast having gone deep in something else
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸High-cardinality or heterogeneous time-series, and an opinion about why most of it is handled badly
- ▸You have had a result meet a production system, and can say whether it survived
- ▸A doctorate or postdoctoral work, though the research residency exists for people mid-doctorate
- ▸Any exposure to causal inference that goes beyond correlation-hunting
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
£240,000 to £420,000 base, plus 0.60% to 1.20% 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.