AI Research Intern - Optexity (USA)

ABOUT OPTEXITY Optexity is a product-driven research lab building clinical reasoning and computer use models on data no other lab can reach. We deploy directly inside clinics and hospitals — including systems with no APIs, using integration infrastructure we've built and open-sourced — and in return become their preferred partner. That gives us proprietary clinical reasoning trajectories from practicing physicians, and a feedback loop between real patient encounters, our models, and the products built on top of them. We're a small, fast-moving founding team with multiple published papers in NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR etc and background from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, CMU, IIT. We are backed by world-class investors and leaders like Jeff Dean, Neotribe VC, PearVC, Together Fund and Zapier Fund.   HOW WE WORK • Customer obsession — we start with the customer and work backwards • Intellectual honesty — ideas matter more than titles; we communicate directly and assume good intent, even in disagreement • Bias for action — we build and learn with customers rather than debate in the abstract • Extreme ownership — we own outcomes, not just tasks, and see problems through Why this role exists Most research roles at this stage hand you a dataset everyone already has and ask you to be marginally better than the last person who tried. Here you get data nobody else has — real clinical reasoning trajectories from practicing physicians — and the room to figure out what to do with it. This is a founding research hire: you'll define the agenda as much as execute it, with direct founder access, real compute, and nothing between an idea and an experiment. What you'll do • Work with real, proprietary clinical data from hospital and clinic partners to surface insights that shape model and product direction • Build clinical reasoning models that improve physician and clinic workflows • Design and publish benchmarks that expose where current LLMs fall short on real clinical reasoning • Evaluate computer-use models on real-world tasks • Own the training and evaluation pipeline end to end • Take open-ended problems from question to working model, with minimal predefined structure • Write up findings as technical reports and papers Ideal candidate • Has real research experience — can define a problem, not just execute a known one • Has trained models before (not just fine-tuned APIs) and is fluent in Python • Master's or higher in ML or a related field • Energized by open-ended problems and ambiguity • Wants to publish, not just ship • Takes ownership without needing to be guided • Genuinely wants a startup over big tech — speed and ambiguity as defaults, not exceptions Nice to have • Prior founder or founding-engineer experience • Strong product taste • Worked on healthcare datasets before • Built LLM-powered products before • Ambitions to start your own company someday — we'll support that path What you get • Direct, daily work with the founders, plus exposure to board and investor conversations • Real ownership of technical direction, with scope that grows as the company does • Full compute and data to do the work properly • Competitive salary and meaningful equity • Visa sponsorship available