Lightcone Research is a team of scientists and engineers on a mission to build the infrastructure for a new era of research, one in which agentic AI is harnessed in the service of rigorous, reproducible, and open science. With a presence at Berkeley and at CNRS in Paris, our team is embedded within some of the world's most prestigious research institutions. Come build the future of AI for science with us!
About the Role
Agentic AI is redefining how we conduct scientific research and promises to put ever more ambitious questions within researchers' reach. For that promise to become a reality, we are developing the open-source tools and standards that equip scientists with agents capable of producing rigorous results, i.e. results that other researchers can reproduce, scrutinize, and build upon. This means building the infrastructure that integrates agents into a complex technology stack (workflow management, high-performance computing, large-scale data infrastructure), designing constructive and effective interactions between researchers and agents, and developing approaches that make the reasoning by which an agent reaches a result traceable and trustworthy.
As a Member of Technical Staff, you will take on a deliberately broad role and contribute to Lightcone Research's efforts wherever your strengths have the greatest impact, across every level of our work: from the design of ASTRA (our open specification for describing scientific analyses) to the development of new interaction paradigms between scientists and agentic systems, to the integration of our agentic stack with high-performance computing facilities. You will work side by side with scientists from CNRS and UC Berkeley to understand the scientific workflows specific to various disciplines, identify the limitations of current agentic systems, and turn those needs into open-source software and standards.
What you'll do
Take ownership of key components of the Lightcone Research Stack. At Lightcone Research, this ownership is vertical: you will drive each component in your care, from technical direction and architecture through implementation, deployment, user feedback, and long-term maintenance.
Collaborate with world-class scientific teams to identify friction points in our agentic suite and turn those limitations into better abstractions, features, and infrastructure.
Sustain our open-source ecosystem together with the rest of the team: designing well-crafted APIs, writing documentation, reviewing code, triaging issues, and supporting external contributors.
This role is for you if you…
- thrive in environments with a high degree of autonomy and responsibility, and enjoy tackling open-ended problems;
- know the world of scientific research, understand its methods and practices, and want to help move science forward;
- have designed, integrated, or evaluated agentic AI systems, and/or are eager to do so in the context of scientific research;
- bring a product mindset: listening to users' needs, understanding and anticipating them, and prioritizing what truly delivers value;
- build solutions (software, infrastructure) that ship to production, with careful attention to detail and strong technical rigor;
- work comfortably in a multidisciplinary team spanning science and engineering;
- share the values of open source and open science.
You don't need to tick every box. Great candidates come from software engineering as much as from scientific research. We would rather talk with you and figure out together whether the role is a fit than see you rule yourself out from the start.
The strongest profiles will stand out through
- deep experience in a data-intensive, computational scientific field (astronomy, physics, genomics, climate science, neuroscience…);
- having created or maintained widely used open-source software, and/or experience growing a community of developers;
- experience with HPC systems and their tooling (e.g., SLURM, Apptainer/Singularity), scientific workflow tools (e.g., Snakemake, CWL, Nextflow), and containerization and orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
About Lightcone Research
Lightcone Research is an open-source initiative building the foundations of AI-assisted science that is reproducible, composable, and verifiable. We are hosted, in France, by the AISSAI Center (AI for Science and Science for AI, UAR2036) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and, in the United States, by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) at UC Berkeley. This project is made possible by the support of Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
The AISSAI Center is the CNRS entity dedicated to AI for science and science for AI, with a mission to structure and coordinate cross-cutting initiatives involving every scientific discipline at the interface with AI, from fundamental physics to biology to the humanities and social sciences. BIDS plays a similar role at UC Berkeley: a central hub for data science and open scientific software, connected across the entire campus, from the physical and life sciences to the humanities and social sciences. This dual anchoring places us at the heart of exchanges with a wide range of academic communities and gives us privileged access to the open-source communities based in Berkeley (from Jupyter to Scientific Python).
You will join a small team (fewer than ten people) where your voice will count and where you can contribute actively at every level, from technical solutions to team culture. As one of the first members of the technical team, you will have wide latitude to innovate, propose ideas, and shape our collective adventure.