Research Associate (Research Assistant)

12 places are open for the 2025-2026 term, with a duration of 6 or 12 months at the applicant's option.

The intent of the fellowship is to focus on high risk research: ambitious projects that may not produce results, but will have lasting impact if they work.

We believe that publication in AI/ML has become overly biased towards short-term and iterative results, despite major gaps in our understanding of how to build optimal models.

The goal of these fellowships is to give awardees uninterrupted time to focus on harder open problems, with adequate compute, talented peers, and weekly 1:1 mentorship from senior researchers but without chasing specific metrics.

You will be expected to spend about 80% of your time on your own research, and up to 20% of your time either assisting other fellows or participating in wider research programs at IMI. We focus largely on applied research and its applications to online security problems, but often publish and support frontier research aligned with our broader interests. Serving hundreds of millions of people gives us a unique perspective as to what works at scale.

Eligibility: prior fellows and research staff have come from disparate backgrounds, including early career researchers previously at MSR, FAIR, Mila, MPI, etc. and self taught mid career engineers transitioning into research. If you have done interesting work, that is enough. We do not discriminate on the basis of pedigree or age. You may reside anywhere in the world, excluding sanctioned jurisdictions.

Please note: This will be a remote fellowship, aside from possible conference travel. We do not sponsor visas.

Deliverables: we do not have hard targets, but generally try to get 1-2 papers with code done in a year, targeting NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc. At the end of your fellowship, if the threshold for publication at a conference or in a journal is unmet we will expect a final report, which may be published as a blog post.

Full details are available at:

(imachines dot com slash imi-ai-ml-fellowships-2025-2026-high-risk-research)

Applying: send a brief bio / CV link via this page. Include 1) the topic you are interested in working on, 2) a few lines on any relevant prior work you've done, 3) your github / scholar / x links, 4) your desired start date, duration, and other obligations (if any) during that period, and 5) a brief analysis of one of the projects outlined on the page linked above.

Each project we have listed intentionally includes some gaps or glosses. List the ones you see, and how you'd solve them. Alternatively, if you dislike the projects outlined under a particular topic, briefly write up your own idea and why it is more promising, along with your estimate of time and compute required.

Deadline: Admitting fellows in two cohorts. Deadlines for consideration: Oct 1 25, Feb 1 26. 3 week decision period. Rolling thereafter.

Compensation: competitive location-adjusted stipend, conference and travel support for conferences with accepted papers.

Selection criteria: novelty and importance, clarity of approach, feasibility given time/compute, alignment with topics. Panel review and one interview.

Selection will be based solely on merit. IMI is an equal opportunity employer, and does not discriminate on the basis of age, disability, sex, orientation, race, religion or belief. We promote equality of opportunity for all, and welcome applications from anyone with talent, skills and potential.