Research Lead, LLM's, Games, & Multi-Agent Environments

The Opportunity

Good Start Labs builds games that make AI models better, for us. We're defining the category of alignment through entertainment.

We need a Research Lead to define and execute our research agenda, manage our ongoing partnerships with PhDs at Princeton, Rice, UCSD, HKUST, UMD, and NYU, and demonstrate model lift from game-based training.

Our agents are integrated into games with millions of players, we have live contracts with model training labs, and our research was just accepted to the NeurIPS workshop on multi-turn interactions in LLMs (submitted to AAAI). We're backed by General Catalyst and Inovia, with advisors including Kelly Clancy (ex-DeepMind, author of Playing With Reality) and researchers from major AI labs like Anthropic.

We believe life's better with play.

What You'll Do

• Design multi-year research program exploring how games improve model capabilities, initially focused on agents and computer use
• Build and optimize RL environments, curate pre-training data, implement training algorithms, run large-scale experiments
• Manage research partnerships with universities and coordinate publication at NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI
• Demonstrate measurable model improvements to current and prospective lab partners
• Lay groundwork for growing the research team as we scale

Who You Are

Required:

• PhD in CS, ML, or related field (or equivalent research experience at top labs)
• Published research in RL, multi-agent systems, game theory, or LLM training
• Strong Python and PyTorch/JAX skills, you implement research ideas, not just design them
• Genuine passion for games and what they teach about reasoning and capability
• Comfortable at early-stage startup (we're 2 years funded, moving fast)

Preferred:

• Experience at DeepMind, FAIR, OpenAI, Anthropic, or top academic groups
• Background in game-playing AI (AlphaGo lineage, Cicero, game engines)
• Familiarity with RLHF, reward modeling, or alignment research
• Experience hiring and growing research teams

What We Offer

• Salary: $140K-$250K USD base, plus meaningful equity
• Location: Toronto or New York preferred; flexible for exceptional remote candidates
• Partnerships: Direct collaboration with research groups at six universities
• Traction: Live contracts, accepted papers, millions of players in games using our agents
• Runway: $3.6M raised, two years funded

To Apply

Send your CV, links to 2-3 publications/projects you're proud of, and a short note about why games + AI excites you to founders@goodstartlabs.com

We review applications on a rolling basis.

Good Start Labs is committed to building a diverse team. We encourage applications from people underrepresented in AI research. We provide visa sponsorship for exceptional candidates.