Senior Research Scientist — Sovereign AI Research

Description

Every nation has data. Few can protect it. Fewer still can act on it.

Dream is the sovereign AI and national cyber-defense company for governments.

We help nations secure their most critical systems, connect fragmented information at a national scale, and turn their most sensitive data into decisions, all fully sovereign.

This is more than a job. It's a Dream job, where you'll work at a global scale alongside some of the best AI researchers, cyber operators, and government experts in the world.

We're building AI that nations own and control, deployed where almost no one else can operate. ingesting and structuring complex data, and driving practical actions that can literally impact the lives of billions of people around the world. This role helps make that real.

The Dream Job

DREAM develops sovereign AI and national cyber-defense capabilities for governments. We build AI systems that turn complex, sensitive data into actionable knowledge—under real-world security, compute, and deployment constraints.

We’re looking for experienced, hands-on researchers who have repeatedly taken complex AI capabilities from initial problem definition to real-world use. Expect scarce data, noisy labels, and problems without an established playbook. You’ll have the autonomy to shape the approach—and the responsibility to make it work.

The Dream-Maker Responsibilities

Our Research Tracks:

We’re hiring across four tracks. We expect deep expertise in at least one, not mastery of all four.

• Agents: Self-improving agents, learning from execution traces, and user feedback. Genetic and evolutionary optimization of workflows, tools, and code
• NLP: Reinforcement learning for language models, distillation, retrieval and embeddings, named-entity and relation extraction, and multilingual learning.
• Vision & Audio: Visual and speech understanding, detection and segmentation, multimodal representation learning, grounding, and cross-modal retrieval.
• Machine Learning: Representation and graph learning, probabilistic and causal modeling, optimization, and learning with limited or noisy data.

What You’ll Own

Take research from an open-ended problem to a working capability: define success, develop the data and methods, run rigorous experiments to make it work. Work closely with engineering through deployment, measuring quality, efficiency, not just benchmark scores. Drive progress through technical blockers, adapt when an approach fails, and strengthen the team through collaboration, technical review, and mentoring.

The Dream Skill Set

• 8+ years of hands-on AI/ML R&D: with substantial ownership of multiple end-to-end projects. We value relevant experience from both industry and military R&D.
• Deep research expertise: supported by an MSc or PhD in a relevant field, or equivalent demonstrated research accomplishments.
• Strong implementation skills: Python, PyTorch or JAX, and direct experience turning raw data into training and evaluation pipelines.
• Independent judgment: The ability to break down ambiguous problems, make technical decisions, and deliver without step-by-step direction.

High ownership. Low ego. We want people who take initiative, work through difficult problems, and care about the outcome. Independence does not mean working alone: ask for help when it improves the result, raise risks early, challenge ideas respectfully, work in team of highly talented researchers, share ideas and collaborate on the toughest problems.

The bar is high (!) for technical depth, execution, and how we treat one another.

Never Stop Dreaming...

If you think this role doesn't fully match your skills but are eager to grow and break glass ceilings, we’d love to hear from you!