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Research Scientist: Hierarchical RL Agents

Astera Institute· AI Research
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Hybrid (Emeryville HQ)$150k - $300kFull-timePosted 8mo ago

About the role

We are seeking brilliant, unconventional thinkers to develop foundational principles of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by advancing hierarchical world modeling, planning, and learning from experience, bridging biology, computation, and scalable systems.

Responsibilities

  • Fundamental Research on Hierarchical World Model Learning from Experience: Develop and implement new architectures and learning/inference algorithms for hierarchical RL that supports hierarchical world modeling and hierarchical planning.
  • Ethologically constrained learning: Design tasks to evaluate the agent in ethologically constrained environments, and benchmark different agent designs. Design experiments to test hypotheses regarding high-level cognition, causal representations, sensory-motor integration, active inference, and unsupervised learning.
  • Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Work alongside neuroscientists and software engineers to translate abstract mathematical frameworks into scalable systems.
  • Contribute to Open Science: Help innovate new publication models that incentivize speedy dissemination, open source code releases, free open access, and impact measurements based on uptake.

Qualifications

  • PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience, Physics, or related quantitative field (exceptional candidates with non-traditional histories considered)
  • Strong foundations in deep learning, graphical models, and information theory
  • Expert-level skills in deep learning frameworks (PyTorch/JAX) with emphasis on clean, reproducible research code
  • AGI Mindset: interest in robustness, generalization, and common-sense reasoning
  • Curious About the Brain: passion for exploring computational and architectural principles of the mammalian brain
  • Startup DNA: ability to thrive in a lean, fast-paced environment with high autonomy and influence on research direction

Skills

Required:Hierarchical Reinforcement LearningEthological Task DesignCross-Disciplinary Collaboration
Nice to have:Open Science / Publication

Benefits

  • Benefits summary (linked)
Last updated Sep 23, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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