FirstPrinciples is a research company building AI for scientific discovery.
We focus on fundamental physics, where we develop AI systems capable of contributing directly to research that will help us better understand the nature of reality.
Our flagship, Theo, the AI physicist, is a domain-specialized system designed to reason like a physicist to support discovery in fundamental science.
By building systems that help researchers navigate knowledge, we aim to reshape how scientific discovery happens.

FirstPrinciples

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product-marketing

FirstPrinciples is a research company building AI systems for discovery in fundamental science. It develops domain-specialized models and tools (branded Theo: Theo Collaborator, Theo Conjecture, and Theo, the AI Physicist) to assist the scientific process—hypothesis generation, symbolic reasoning, tool integration, validation loops, and reproducible research objects. The company emphasizes transparency, stewardship of knowledge as a public good, and alignment with the scientific community. Technical claims include multiple fine-tuned models across physics domains, a model family with 120B+ parameters trained on a curated corpus of 3M+ scientific papers, and internal experiments in areas like quantum information.

FirstPrinciples is a research company building AI for scientific discovery. We focus on fundamental physics, where we develop AI systems capable of contributing directly to research that will help us better understand the nature of reality.

Our flagship, Theo, the AI physicist, is a domain-specialized system designed to reason like a physicist to support discovery in fundamental science. By building systems that help researchers navigate knowledge, we aim to reshape how scientific discovery happens.

• Build the commercial function from the ground up, testing and refining the ICP, messaging, sales process, and go-to-market motion
• Define and own the go-to-market strategy and build relationships and pipeline across commercial R&D teams, industry researchers, research groups, national laboratories, and emerging customer segments
• Own the end-to-end commercial lifecycle from prospecting and qualification through discovery, demos, proposals, and close
• Lead strategic outreach and early customer development while building repeatable approaches for reaching physicists and research leaders
• Conduct technically credible discovery conversations and product demos connecting research goals to product use cases
• Help prospective customers structure pilot plans, establish success criteria, and build confidence in platform adoption
• Navigate scientific, technical, administrative, procurement, and leadership stakeholders
• Define and build systems for outreach, qualification, account planning, CRM management, forecasting, and pipeline management
• Work with Research Partners on handoff from commercial agreement to onboarding, usage, and long-term adoption
• Bring market feedback, objections, and emerging use cases to product, research, and engineering
• Own pipeline, conversion, and revenue goals while helping define the early sales playbook
• Partner with leadership on ICP definition, positioning, packaging, pricing, and go-to-market priorities

Head of GTM

Head of GTM commercializing FirstPrinciples’ AI products for scientific discovery. Building go-to-market strategy, customer pipeline, sales systems, and adoption across research organizations.

security-engineer

• Define security architecture for Theo's SaaS application, APIs, cloud infrastructure, model-serving systems, agent runtimes, data platforms, research environments, and deployment pipelines
• Build authentication and authorization for users, services, and AI agents, including scoped credentials, delegated permissions, least-privilege access, tenant isolation, and auditable actions
• Design hardened execution environments for agent-generated and user-provided code with isolation, resource limits, filesystem and network controls, provenance, monitoring, and escape testing
• Lead threat modelling and secure design across Engineering, Research, Product, and Infrastructure from architecture through production
• Defend against AI- and agent-specific threats including prompt injection, unsafe tool use, confused-deputy behavior, poisoning, exfiltration, model extraction, privilege escalation, and resource abuse
• Build secure-by-default services, libraries, policies, test harnesses, and platform controls for identity, secrets, encryption, policy enforcement, auditability, abuse prevention, and vulnerability management
• Integrate SAST, DAST, dependency, container, infrastructure-as-code, secret, and software supply-chain scanning into development and release workflows
• Establish security reviews, release controls, SBOMs, artifact provenance, and automated security regression testing
• Conduct penetration tests, red-team and purple-team exercises, architecture attacks, and abuse-case testing
• Assess vulnerabilities, coordinate remediation with engineers, validate fixes, and eliminate recurring weaknesses
• Protect model weights, training and evaluation data, datasets, embeddings, registries, research artifacts, GPU infrastructure, and software supply chains
• Define telemetry, alerting, containment, and forensic capabilities for incidents involving users, services, agents, models, and data
• Translate SOC 2 and customer security requirements into technical controls and support FedRAMP and NIST SP 800-53 readiness
• Automate evidence collection and control validation
• Mentor engineers, establish reusable patterns, document architectural decisions, and communicate risks to technical teams and leadership
• Within the first year, establish clear risk-based security architecture, explicit controls and adversarial coverage, secure-by-default workflows, integrated testing, remediation ownership, and a technical path toward FedRAMP readiness

Staff Product Security Engineer – AI Systems

Staff Product Security Engineer defining security architecture for FirstPrinciples’ AI scientific-discovery platform. Securing agents, code execution, cloud infrastructure, models, data, and SaaS systems.

general-counsel

• We are hiring our first in-house legal counsel to build the legal function at FirstPrinciples.
• You will serve as the primary legal partner for the entire organization globally.
• Support our Canadian foundation, our US 501(c)(3), and future international entities, working across borders, legal systems, and institutional norms.
• Work closely with the executive leadership team and will be involved early in shaping how the organization is structured & operates.
• Develop and oversee AI governance frameworks, including responsible AI policies, model documentation standards, and regulatory compliance across jurisdictions.
• Advise on intellectual property strategy, including patent evaluation, trade secrets, open-source licensing, and ownership of AI-generated research outputs.
• Maintain and regularly update the organization's website privacy policy and terms of use to reflect evolving legal requirements, product changes, and best practices.
• Ensure compliance with emerging AI and data regulations globally.
• Support corporate governance for Canadian, US, and future international entities, including board matters, resolutions, and regulatory obligations.
• Coordinate with the Director of Finance on key regulatory filings including Form 990 (IRS), T3010 (CRA), and other global compliance filings.
• Coordinate with external counsel in the US and other jurisdictions as needed.
• Draft and negotiate vendor agreements, NDAs, and other commercial contracts used across the organization.
• Provide guidance on export controls, sanctions compliance, and cross-border data and AI model transfers.
• Structure, draft, and negotiate data acquisition, licensing, and usage agreements with academic institutions, research consortia, publishers, and other data providers across multiple jurisdictions.
• Advise on data rights, permitted uses, restrictions, and risk exposure in the context of AI-driven research and model development.
• Lead legal structuring and negotiation of collaboration agreements with universities, research institutes, nonprofits, and other partners globally.
• Draft and negotiate MOUs, research collaboration agreements, joint research agreements, and related frameworks.
• Ensure agreements align with FirstPrinciples’ mission, nonprofit obligations, and long-term research goals across jurisdictions.
• Develop and manage legal frameworks for fellowships, internships, co-op programs, visiting researcher arrangements, and academic secondments across Canada, the US, and other regions.
• Draft and review offer letters, program agreements, and related documentation in coordination with the Director of Talent and Director of Finance.
• Advise on IP ownership, publication rights, confidentiality, and conflicts of interest related to research talent.
• Advise on cross-border charitable solicitation, donor restrictions, grant agreements, and nonprofit regulatory requirements.
• Support board governance, conflict of interest policies, and compliance with private benefit rules.
• Identify legal and regulatory risks early and provide clear, practical guidance to leadership.
• Help design legal processes that scale as the organization grows internationally without slowing execution.
• Act as a thought partner on new legal questions at the intersection of AI, data, nonprofit law, and global research collaboration.

Director of Legal

In-house legal counsel at FirstPrinciples supporting global operations and compliance across jurisdictions. Developing AI governance frameworks and managing corporate legal affairs.

software-engineer

• Research, design, and test novel, research‑specific model architectures that integrate academic literature, natural language processing (NLP), symbolic reasoning, and other methods to orchestrate the scientific process.
• Prototype and build custom tokenizers for LaTeX symbols and physical units to be treated as tokens.
• Explore alternatives to transformers through in-depth research and provide practical recommendations for model development.
• Develop reinforcement-learning loops to enable models to run independent and internal thought experiments.
• Design and automate data ingestion pipelines in collaboration with our Data Scientists & Engineers that aggregates science literature, metadata, experimental data, equations and other data sources in a robust and scalable manner.
• Establish custom benchmarks to assess the models’ understanding of physical concepts, mathematical reasoning abilities, and ability to minimize hallucinations for the benefit of scientific reliability.
• Refine and release datasets and baselines once internal tests are stable.
• Run and track model training jobs while leading the technical team through set-up, monitoring progress, and constraining costs within budget.
• Develop approaches to stage “practice runs” in a sandbox environment to develop the model’s abilities to explore ideas independently while logging results for later review.
• Develop a framework to evaluate the models’ learning using visual and statistical tools to spot patterns and blind spots.
• Add guard-rails and tests that flag poor quality model output.
• Maintain internal tools to track lists of known issues, noting failures, clear fixes, and improvements to be integrated into future development.
• Work with the engineering team to ensure product feasibility and robust architecture.
• Translate technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders in clear terms.
• Present findings in clear updates to the technical team in order to keep the broader team appraised of progress against research milestones.

Technical Staff Member, Research

Research-focused AI role at FirstPrinciples designing and developing innovative solutions for scientific discovery. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to advance scientific research methodologies.

engineering-manager

• Manage, coach, and develop a team of four to six engineers
• Form and lead multidisciplinary squads
• Translate open-ended research goals into technical strategies
• Partner closely with researchers and physicists
• Create effective paths for collaboration between researchers and engineers
• Guide architecture, interfaces, technical standards, and implementation decisions
• Establish clear ownership and decision-making across teams
• Influence engineering strategy beyond immediate team

Senior Engineering Manager

Senior Engineering Manager leading a team to build AI capabilities for scientific discovery. Collaborating with researchers and engineers in developing and implementing innovative solutions.

manager

• Define a research agenda spanning near-term capabilities, reusable platforms, and field-shaping bets.
• Manage, mentor, and grow researchers with strong scientific taste, technical depth, and ownership.
• Fully own the business impact of research by connecting it to product, market, and user needs, setting clear milestones and maximizing the potential for projects to turn into capabilities.
• Frame bold research theses and design decisive experiments, baselines, evaluations, and failure analyses.
• Remain technically engaged in model development, post-training, data strategy, evaluation, and critical implementations.
• Form integrated squads with engineering and domain experts from the outset of a program.
• Help prototypes become reliable, reproducible, and reusable systems without losing their scientific insight.
• Build compounding assets such as models, datasets, verifiers, benchmarks, simulations, agent runtimes, and research infrastructure.
• Use evidence to decide when to deepen, redirect, scale, publish, protect, open-source, deploy, or conclude a line of work.
• Influence broader research strategy, hiring, technical standards, infrastructure, and resource allocation.

Senior Research Manager

Senior Research Manager guiding a research team at FirstPrinciples for AI-driven scientific discovery. Defining research agendas and mentoring researchers to drive impactful outcomes.

FirstPrinciples is a research company building AI for scientific discovery. We focus on fundamental physics, where we develop AI systems capable of contributing directly to research that will help us better understand the nature of reality. Our flagship, Theo, the AI physicist, is a domain-specialized system designed to reason like a physicist to support discovery in fundamental science. By building systems that help researchers navigate knowledge, we aim to reshape how scientific discovery happens.

FirstPrinciples

About the company

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6 jobs found

Head of GTM

FirstPrinciples

Staff Product Security Engineer – AI Systems

FirstPrinciples

Director of Legal

FirstPrinciples

Technical Staff Member, Research

FirstPrinciples

Senior Engineering Manager

FirstPrinciples

Senior Research Manager

FirstPrinciples