Head of Research
About the role
Lead the research function behind Arva AI's AI Agent platform, defining the research agenda, building and directing the team, and delivering production-ready models and evaluation infrastructure for compliant, scalable financial crime solutions.
Responsibilities
- Own Arva's AI research strategy, deciding where to build in-house capability, where to adapt frontier models, and which bets provide durable technical edge.
- Build and lead the research team, setting the technical bar and practices to get research into production quickly and safely.
- Own model quality as a company-level outcome, from evaluation methodology and benchmarks through to accuracy, explainability, latency and reliability of what runs in front of customers and regulators.
- Define and own the research roadmap grounded in customer workflows, regulatory realities, and frontier capabilities of LLMs, agents, and vision models.
- Make build-vs-adapt decisions: when to fine-tune/distil/train bespoke models vs. leveraging frontier APIs.
- Translate new research into production impact with continuous evaluation of methods for quality, explainability, latency, cost, and reliability.
- Hire, develop and retain AI researchers and engineers, and establish rigorous operating cadence for planning, reviews, and ownership.
- Lead from the front on training runs, eval design, and failure analysis.
- Own evaluation stack and backtests to quantify performance against real compliance workflows and catch regressions.
- Create continuous-improvement loops turning human-in-the-loop feedback into dataset curation, fine-tuning, distillation, and measurable gains in model behavior.
- Establish model documentation and validation practices expected by regulated institutions and auditors.
- Train, fine-tune and deploy LLMs and vision models for compliance use cases (document fraud detection, entity screening, web-scale due diligence).
- Maintain MLOps around datasets, labels, backtests, and benchmarks for velocity with reproducibility.
- Partner with product and engineering to shape scalable solutions and accelerate research-to-customer delivery.
- Support GTM in articulating technical edge in due diligence and launches, and represent research publicly through publications and talks.
Qualifications
- 5+ years in applied AI research or ML engineering with leadership and production deployment experience.
- A PhD in machine learning, AI or related field is nice to have but not required.
Skills
Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity package, with bi-annual salary review and yearly performance-based equity refresh.
- 4 weeks/year of global remote work flexibility and regular team off-sites.
About Arva AI
AI Agents to scale AML, KYB and KYC operations
Banks and fintechs have large teams of human analysts who conduct manual checks and reviews. We replace those human compliance analysts with AI agents that automate 80% of the manual work for faster and more compliant financial crime (AML) reviews. Our first three products are: Screening AI (discount 91% of screening alerts), KYB/C AI (speed up onboarding), Transaction Monitoring AI (handle AML transaction monitoring alerts) Our end goal is to have a whole suite of AI workers that can handle manual compliance work for banks and fintechs. A $24B opportunity in the US alone.
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