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
As a Member of the Technical Staff with a software engineering focus, you will bring engineering expertise across every level of our work: from the design of ASTRA (our open specification for describing scientific analyses), to the development of our agentic stack for scientific research and its integration with high-performance computing facilities. You will work side by side with scientists from CNRS and UC Berkeley to understand the scientific workflows specific to various disciplines, identify the limitations of current agentic systems, and turn those needs into open-source software and standards.
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 key components of the Lightcone Research Stack. 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.
Collaborate with world-class scientific teams to identify friction points in our agentic suite and turn those limitations into better abstractions, features, and infrastructure.
Sustain our open-source ecosystem together with the rest of the team: designing well-crafted APIs, writing documentation, reviewing code, triaging issues, and supporting external contributors, as well as championing the impact of open-source practices through the UC Berkeley Open Source Program Office.
This role is for you if you...
- have advanced programming skills, including Python expertise, and advanced skills in software specification, design, implementation, and deployment at large scale;
- are fluent using agentic AI and LLM coding agents (such as Claude and/or Codex) as part of your daily software engineering practice;
- have built software, tooling, or infrastructure for agentic AI / LLM systems: agent frameworks, tool and skill integrations, or evaluation harnesses;
- have a track record of open-source development and transparent project management;
- 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.
A Bachelor's degree in a related area and/or equivalent experience/training is required.
The strongest profiles will stand out through
- experience with HPC and scientific workflow systems: job schedulers (e.g., SLURM), containerization (e.g., Docker, Apptainer/Singularity, Kubernetes), and workflow tools (e.g., Snakemake, CWL, Dask, Nextflow);
- experience participating in multi-stakeholder open-source communities: distributed decision-making, consensus-building, coordinating paid and volunteer contributors, mentoring;
- a track record building tools used by research teams in the life sciences, physical sciences, geosciences, social sciences, humanities, or public health;
- experience conducting research in a data-intensive scientific domain.
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.