Staff Research Engineer

About the company

Onton provides a search and discovery engine that lets consumers find products using natural-language or image queries and aggregates results from across the web.

About this role

Our mission at Onton is to help people make decisions they love, instantly. We’re tackling the most economically impactful decisions first: the average shopping journey takes 79 days, and we’re taking that to less than 1. Since our public launch in late 2023, we've grown exponentially to guide millions of users to their perfect product. We recently built the foundation of a neurosymbolic AI agent that learns more about the world on every search. You have the chance to solve equally difficult problems as you scale Onton 10x over the next few months to serve 1B+ searches/year, which is just the beginning. This is only the beginning. Providing a person with sufficient context to make any decision in a truly optimal way amounts to creating AGI. The economic engine we’re creating on the e-commerce side, while a huge opportunity in its own right, is ultimately to support this end. Paradigm shifts like the one we’re in — from narrow AI to human-level AGI and beyond — are vanishingly rare. We want to offer you the chance to do your life’s work solving the problem that will solve all other problems. YOUR OPPORTUNITY Together we will create an AI agent capable of providing a person, or itself, with sufficient context to make optimal decisions as quickly as possible. This agent will ultimately be capable of superseding most things we do at Onton. Our current application of e-commerce, making an optimal purchase decision — considering user preferences, millions of products, and billions of reviews — already requires a world model and a logical consistency far beyond the state of the art. Even OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 can’t rid itself of the problem of hallucination, and there are no sufficiently robust bolt-on solutions for context finiteness (RAG is not enough), catastrophic forgetting, or many other fundamental problems afflicting current-gen AI systems. Contra OpenAI, we believe that scale is not all you need. These challenges can only be addressed at the architectural level. Recently we’ve built the foundation of a neurosymbolic AI agent that learns more about the world on every search. It’s still in its infancy, but its compositionally-grounded architecture shows promise as the basis of a truly general problem solver. With your ingenuity — realized through your self-directed, data-driven experiments from first principles — we can turn its sparks of intelligence into a fire. WE EXPECT YOU TO - Have significant software, ML, or research engineering experience - Command a deep, principled understanding of the current state of the field of AI, especially neurosymbolic approaches. - Have some experience contributing to empirical AI research projects - Enjoy implementation, not just writing papers. - Be excited about non-purely-statistical approaches to AI. - Prefer fast-moving collaborative projects to extensive solo efforts. - Quickly and iteratively ship code that is correct, robust, scalable, and maintainable. We’re not optimizing for novelty, academic recognition, or theoretical purity. Recognition will come easily from the excellence of the product we build. WE’D LOVE IT IF YOU: - Have a PhD or Master’s in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, or comparable (or equivalent research experience). ONSITE INTERVIEWS Our final round of interviews is conducted onsite at our SF office, and this role requires full-time, in-person collaboration. We believe that the best work happens when our team is together, fostering creativity, spontaneous collaboration, and strong relationships. If you’re unable to attend the interviews onsite or work onsite full-time, this position may not be the right fit. We want to ensure all candidates have a clear understanding of our work environment before applying, so everyone’s time is respected throughout the process. LOCATION Our team works in hybrid, 3 days a week, in our new office in San Francisco (Jackson Square). We’re offering relocation compensation as we build density in this area. We have a tenure system where, after a year, any team member can transition to a fully remote, provided they operate primarily on Pacific Time. DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION, AND BELONGING STATEMENT We hire talented and passionate people from diverse backgrounds to ensure our global workforce reflects our customers. Even if your experience doesn't perfectly match every requirement in the job description, we encourage you to apply. If you're a builder at heart who shares our values and is passionate about making software tools accessible to all, we want to hear from you. Onton is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or employment decisions based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics. We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. We are also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans during our application process. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please contact your recruiter.