Head of Research

Job Description: Head of ResearchResearch at Ethara turns open problems into shipped, reproducible results. We run a pod-based research function under a shared agenda, and every delivery team draws on that depth through its attached researcher. You will own that engine end to end.1. Role DetailsTitle: Head of ResearchVertical: ResearchReporting to: CTOYears of Experience: 10-15 years2. Team and MissionEthara Research works in pods under a shared agenda. Research Leads (R4 to R5) run the pods; researchers and research engineers (R3 to R5) staff them. The Head of Research is the vertical's single point of contact and named gatekeeper: research agenda owner, hiring authority, external interface, and final offer sign-off. The role holds the Principal Investigator (PI) responsibility for the vertical bar, spanning ethics review, dataset and compute governance, training-run governance, peer review, and publication approval.3. Role MissionYour goal is to achieve these outcomes in your first 6 to 12 months:Publish and defend a 2 to 3 year research agenda that aligns pod roadmaps with Ethara's product and delivery direction.Run the full research hiring loop as PI (research-taste interviews, job talks, advisor reference calls) and grow the vertical to plan without lowering the bar.Take at least one flagship research claim from idea through ethics review, tracked experiments, peer review, and publication approval to public release.4. ResponsibilitiesOwn the research agenda: choose the problems worth working on, prune the ones that are not, and defend the trade-offs to the leadership team.Run the Research Leads with a shallow reporting chain, pod-level bars, and day-to-day review discipline per the research lifecycle.Hold the PI responsibility: chair ethics review, sign off training-run and dataset governance, and gate peer review and publication approval.Own the hiring bar for R3 to R5: conduct research-taste interviews and advisor reference calls personally, call consensus in calibration, and sign every offer.Represent Ethara Research externally through conference presence, collaborations, open-source releases, and advisor-network sourcing, while stewarding compute and research budget allocation across pods.5. Must-have Qualifications10 to 15 years of research experience spanning academia and industry, with a record of leading research teams or groups.PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a closely related field.First-author publications at tier-1 venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, CVPR, or equivalent) and evidence of setting, not just meeting, a publication bar.Working exposure to Python and the modern ML research stack (PyTorch or JAX, experiment tracking, reproducible pipelines); you must be able to read a pod's code and challenge its methodology.Demonstrated hiring judgement: you have built a research team, run reference calls, and made hard no-hire calls.6. Nice-to-have QualificationsExperience governing training runs, dataset provenance, or research ethics processes at an AI lab or research-driven company.Open-source research artifacts with sustained community adoption.Prior PI or grant-holding experience, or service as an area chair or senior reviewer at a tier-1 venue.7. Success @ 6 MonthsWe measure your success by these metrics:Research agenda published, reviewed by leadership, and each pod's roadmap traceable to it.Time-to-fill for R3 to R4 roles inside the 45 to 75 day target, with calibration variance within 1 Likert point on 80% of scored dimensions.At least one work item through the full lifecycle gate (ethics review, peer review, publication approval) with reproducibility artifacts filed.9. Location and Work ArrangementLocation: Gurugram, Haryana, India (remote-first)Work Model: On-Site (5 days working)