Principal Scientist, Evolutionary Search & Autonomous Discovery

The Role

Pioneering Intelligence is building an autonomous system capable of exploring large scientific and computational search spaces. A central challenge in this effort is designing algorithms that can generate, evaluate, refine, and recombine candidate solutions over many iterative cycles, continuously improving their performance while maintaining exploration of novel directions. We are looking for a Senior Principal Scientist to invent and build the next generation of evolutionary algorithms.

In this role you will develop methods that enable populations of models, hypotheses, programs, or scientific representations to evolve over time through iterative search, selection, variation, and evaluation. Your work will draw on ideas from evolutionary computation, Bayesian inference, reinforcement learning, optimization, and automated scientific discovery. You will help define how AI systems navigate vast spaces of possible solutions — balancing exploration and exploitation, preserving diversity, and discovering novel approaches that would be difficult to identify through conventional optimization alone.  This is a senior individual-contributor role with significant scientific latitude and direct influence on the technical direction of PI's autonomous-science platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement alg