Principal AI Researcher (Agentic Systems & AI Infrastructure)

About Us Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems. About Trase Co-founded in 2023 by Joe Laws and Grant Verstandig , Trase Systems is AI, Uncomplicated. Trase empowers enterprise leaders to harness the full potential of AI without the associated complexity and risks. We are an end-to-end solution for deploying, managing, and optimizing AI in the enterprise. Our platform specializes in bridging the “last mile” of AI adoption, unlocking AI's full potential while driving efficiency and significant cost savings. Trase is at the forefront of AI Agent innovation, topping the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for Generalized AI Assistants, ahead of industry giants such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. We are leveraging our cutting-edge technologies to develop mission-critical agentic applications in complex industries such as Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and National Security. About the Role As a Principal AI Researcher, you will define and drive the long-term research direction for the Trase operating system, the agentic execution platform powering autonomous systems in regulated environments. This role sits at the intersection of frontier AI research, agentic systems, orchestration infrastructure, and production deployment, with a focus on how models behave inside real-world execution environments rather than solely on offline benchmark performance. You will lead research across areas such as agent workflows, tool use, long-lived execution, orchestration, and autonomous system reliability, while conducting large-scale experimentation and advancing novel approaches in applied AI systems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role operating across research, systems, and product. You will drive technical breakthroughs in agentic infrastructure and applied AI systems, own the end-to-end research-to-production lifecycle, and work closely with engineering and product teams to translate frontier research into scalable, production-grade systems deployed across Trase. Why This Role Exists Trase OS coordinates long-lived agents, tool-augmented LLMs, multi-agent workflows, and execution in regulated enterprise environments. As these systems scale, the core challenge shifts from raw model capability to system correctness, orchestration reliability, infrastructure governance, and safe autonomous execution. We are particularly interested in candidates with expertise or research interest in areas such as: agent-to-agent learning, orchestration and harness engineering, infrastructure governance for AI operating systems, long-lived execution and memory systems, SLMs (small language models), model optimization, and fine-tuning recipes, post-training adaptation techniques and model behavior shaping, and evaluation frameworks for autonomous agents. This role will help define how next-generation AI systems are researched, evaluated, and safely operated in production. Responsibilities Define and evolve the long-term AI/ML research strategy and technical roadmap for Trase OS in alignment with product and platform direction. Lead large-scale experimentation and prototyping efforts requiring significant compute infrastructure, translating frontier AI research into scalable, production-grade systems with measurable impact. Drive original research and technical breakthroughs in agentic systems, autonomous execution, multi-agent orchestration, post-training and fine-tuning systems, SLM/LLM-based architectures, and applied AI infrastructure. Design how models operate within long-lived execution environments, including agent workflows, tool use, planning, memory systems, reasoning, and human-in-