Our mission is to build the infrastructure for a new era of research in which agentic AI enables scientists to tackle more ambitious problems without sacrificing rigor or confidence in their results. At its core, we are reimagining the scientific record by representing analyses as structured, extensible research objects that make the reasoning and provenance behind their results explicit. Around this foundation, we are building the infrastructure to support modern scientific workflows; imagining the future of agent-researcher interactions; and laying the foundations for a shared corpus of scientific results that can be trusted and extended.
Based at UC Berkeley and CNRS in Paris, our team is embedded in some of the world’s leading research institutions, supported by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, and advised by leading scientists and prominent figures in open source.
About the Role
How research gets done is fundamentally changing across the entire stack: agentic AI is reshaping every layer of the scientific environment, from the daily workflows of individual researchers, to collaboration between peers and mentors, to the way science draws on and adds to its collective corpus.
As a Member of Technical Staff with a product engineering focus, you will help define how scientists interact with agentic systems across each of these layers. We are looking for someone who is excited to engage directly with scientists, observing their workflows, gathering feedback, testing ideas with them, and equally comfortable prototyping and building solutions within our technical stack.
You will join a small team (fewer than ten people) where your voice will count and where you can contribute actively at every level, from technical solutions to team culture. As one of the first members of the technical staff, you will play a critical role in innovating, proposing ideas, and shaping our collective adventure.
This is a full-time position at UC Berkeley, based on campus at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS).
What you’ll do
Take ownership of the researcher experience of the Lightcone Research Stack, including the interaction patterns and interfaces of agent-assisted research. At Lightcone Research, this ownership is vertical: you will drive each component in your care, from technical direction and architecture through implementation, deployment, user feedback, and long-term maintenance.
Embed with world-class scientific teams to identify friction in their research workflows and translate what you find into interaction patterns, product decisions, and infrastructure across the Lightcone stack.
This role is for you if you...
- advanced skills in the specification, design, implementation, and deployment of large-scale, user-facing systems, backed by advanced programming skills, including Python expertise;
- bring strong visual and interaction design craft: the ability to establish interaction principles, reusable components, and a coherent visual language for deeply technical software;
- are fluent using agentic AI and LLM coding agents (such as Claude and/or Codex) to move quickly between design, prototyping, and implementation;
- have a curious mindset and an appetite for navigating complexity and uncertainty, and a track record of scoping and delivering on requirements from interdisciplinary teams;
- bring excellent project leadership, communication, and complex problem-solving skills;
- bring strong software development and maintenance practice: git, testing, CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar).
A Bachelor's degree in a related area and/or equivalent experience/training is required.
The strongest profiles will stand out through...
- experience designing and building software, tooling, or infrastructure for agentic AI / LLM systems (agent frameworks, tool and skill integrations, or evaluation harnesses) with a particular focus on researcher experience and human-agent interaction patterns;
- Proven track record building or designing tools that are used by research teams to conduct cutting-edge innovation in the life sciences, physical sciences (astronomy, physics, chemistry), and geosciences, and/or the social sciences, humanities, and public health;
- experience participating in multi-stakeholder open-source communities: distributed decision-making, consensus-building, coordinating paid and volunteer contributors, mentoring.
About Lightcone Research
Lightcone Research is an open-source initiative building the foundations of AI-assisted science that is reproducible, composable, and verifiable. We are hosted, in the United States, by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) at UC Berkeley and, in France, by the AISSAI Center (AI for Science and Science for AI, UAR2036) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). This project is made possible by the support of Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
BIDS is a central hub for data science and open scientific software at UC Berkeley, connected across the entire campus, from the physical and life sciences to the humanities and social sciences. The AISSAI Center plays a similar role at CNRS: the entity dedicated to AI for science and science for AI, with a mission to structure and coordinate cross-cutting initiatives involving every scientific discipline at the interface with AI, from fundamental physics to biology to the humanities and social sciences. This dual anchoring places us at the heart of exchanges with a wide range of academic communities and gives us privileged access to the open-source communities based in Berkeley (from Jupyter to Scientific Python).
Note: Applications are handled by UC Berkeley: the Apply button takes you to the official UC Berkeley posting.