Applied AI Researcher

About the Company: We are a well-funded, rapidly growing, early-stage startup building a global consumer AI product for daily needs. We work on the cutting edge of AI across the stack. Check out our product and how we are championing the AI landscape by introducing every AI to everyone on our launch blog post. Moreover, the consumer product is built for the deeper purpose of solving the foundational challenge of robust and trustworthy AI model evaluations and data.

Job Summary: We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Applied AI researcher to join our innovative team. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in modern LLM architectures and applications, and experience in using GenAI approaches in an applied, production environment.

Responsibilities:

• Research: Follow and understand recent trends in GenAI developments, and how they may apply to directions the company is pursuing.

• Engineering: Design, build, and maintain LLM applications; optionally own the ML lifecycle, including data analysis and processing, model architecture and training, metrics/evaluation, and MLOps.

• Communication: Convey complex technical information at different levels, including to other LLM experts and non-AI practitioners.

• Collaboration: Work closely with product engineers, designers, and data scientists to define and build cutting edge AI solutions across the company.

Qualifications:

• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, or a related field; Ph.D. or similar experience is a plus.

• Experience: 3+ years of experience in the ML space; track record of deploying AI models in real-world applications.

• Skills: Excellent coding skills; proficiency in Python and familiarity with libraries such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, NumPy, and JAX. Strong understanding of machine learning algorithms and data structures.

• Communication: Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to clearly articulate design decisions and rationale.

• Problem-Solving: Strong analytical skills with the ability to work independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Publications: Authored or co-authored research papers in reputable AI/ML venues, or impactful technical blog posts.

• Open source: Active participation in open-source relevant repos, Kaggle competitions, and similar projects.

• Startup experience: Worked at small, fast-paced environments.

What’s Yupp?

Yupp is a novel, two sided product where the two product sides create a mutually reinforcing virtuous cycle – one side is a global consumer AI product and the other side is an AI data product meant for AI builders, researchers and developers.

The consumer product provides users globally with a fun and easy way to discover, compare, and use the latest and greatest AI models – all for free (!) and all while helping to shape the future of the field of AI. It has a unique angle – that of giving the user multiple AI responses, not just one – ranked as best AIs for the user’s query, much like in a search engine. Getting multiple opinions and perspectives can help the user develop a more nuanced understanding, make better decisions, and ultimately get stuff done faster.

Furthermore, Yupp’s product gently nudges the user to express their preferences and thus give feedback to AI builders. User feedback helps tailor the AIs better for them, but it also helps the AI community build better models for everyone. User’s aggregated feedback is like a global pulse of which AI models and agents are being preferred by humans and why. Crucially, this helps tackle the foundational challenge of robust and trustworthy AI evaluation. This is expressed by the other side of Yupp’s product in the form of rich analytics and AI data and evaluations, meant for AI builders, researchers and developers. So, simply by using Yupp, users make a meaningful contribution to the future of the field of AI.

Why join Yupp?

TL;DR – By joining Yupp, you will have the ride of a lifetime together with some of the smartest and most seasoned colleagues. You’ll work on challenging, large-scale problems at the cutting edge of AI to build novel products that touch millions of users globally and help advance the state of the field of AI. Moreover, your work will go towards the larger purpose expressed by Yupp’s mission to empower humanity to shape the future of AI.

Yupp’s founders (Pankaj Gupta, Gilad Mishne) and Chief Scientist (Prof Jimmy Lin) are seasoned product, engineering and AI leaders with the experience of multiple startups as well as engineering and AI teams in Twitter, Google and Coinbase. They met while being early employees of Twitter, and built from scratch many ML based product features that are still there in the Twitter product such as Twitter search, recommendations, trends, etc. They have deep experience in building large scale consumer products from zero to hundreds of millions of users.

Yupp’s founding team is highly experienced and comes from companies like Twitter, Google, Coinbase, Microsoft and Paypal. This is one of the smartest, most fun, cracked top talent you will ever work with. Our work culture provides a high degree of autonomy, ownership and impact. It’s intense and isn’t for everyone. But if you want to build the future of AI alongside others who are at the top of their game and expect the same from you, there’s no better startup to be.

We are well-funded having raised a seed round of $33M in 2024, led by the veteran investor and Internet luminary Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz. In addition, we are proud to be backed by more than 45 individual angels and small investors who are among the finest builders, visionary thinkers, and tech executives – including Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist, Google; Biz Stone, co-founder Twitter; Evan Sharp, co-founder Pinterest; Aravind Srinivas, CEO Perplexity; Kunal Shah, CEO Cred; four professors at Stanford University (Prof Dan Boneh, Prof Chris Re, Prof Nick McKeown, Prof Balaji Prabhakar), Othman Laraki, Paul Grewal, Gokul Rajaram and Coinbase Ventures. You can see the full list of our investors at https://about.yupp.ai/

We came out of stealth and launched recently in June 2025 , and have received an overwhelmingly positive response so far. We’re just getting started on an ambitious journey at the cutting edge of AI. At Yupp, you will experience both the excitement of building for a large scale global user base as well as the deeply technical AI model builders and researchers. You’ll get immersed in and learn all about the latest and greatest AI models and agents. Come join us on this exciting journey!