Head of Research - Relational Foundation Models

About the role

Avra is a frontier AI lab building relational foundation models from the ground up, used by leading Latin American enterprises for credit, growth and fraud decisions. The Head of Research leads a small research team working on pretraining, post-training, data and evaluation for foundation models on structured data such as relational databases, graphs and time series. The role is remote, with the team based in São Paulo and spread across San Francisco, Latin America and Europe.

Key responsibilities

• Own the research portfolio: what it works on, what it stops, and who owns each initiative, together with the Chief Scientist
• Hire, develop and allocate researchers, and make Avra attractive to top researchers in relational and tabular machine learning
• Set the cadence: written hypotheses, research reviews, decision records, an experiment ladder and a compute budget
• Hand candidate models and their evidence to ML Systems for release, work with data teams on pretraining corpora and support forward deployment
• Define model commitments to customers, risk teams and executives, and explain them clearly
• Stay hands-on: reading code, running experiments and checking training curves

Required profile

• Has led a research or applied ML team whose models ran in production and moved a real metric
• Deep technical credibility in modern deep learning, especially transformers, pretraining and post-training
• Portfolio judgment: knows when to scale ideas and when to kill them
• Has hired and grown researchers who achieved great success
• Clear written and spoken English; Portuguese is a bonus

Required skills

• Reproducibility, evaluation protocols and compute budget management
• Bonus: pretrained foundation models, tabular or relational foundation models, in-context learning, meta-learning, or models for credit, fraud or regulated decisions
• Bonus: research or open-source work others build on

What we offer

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity
• A compute and research budget owned by the role
• Flexible time off, health coverage and extended parental leave