Principal Investigator – AI Residency Program

About the job

Maincode is building sovereign AI models in Australia. We train foundation models from scratch, design new reasoning architectures, and deploy them on state-of-the-art GPU clusters. This is not fine-tuning someone else’s work. This is creating new systems from first principles.

We’re looking for a principal investigator to run our AI Residency Program. The program brings top academic talent into Maincode — late-stage PhD students, postdocs, and professors — for six-month residencies where they pursue ambitious research projects in their domain of expertise. The goal is to explore ideas at the frontier of AI while connecting them to the scale, infrastructure, and engineering talent of industry.

The residency program is a strategically important aspect of Maincode's research agenda; enabling exploratory, high-upside research that complements and extends core-team efforts, and acts as a pipeline for exceptional talent into Maincode. As the principal investigator, you will own its growth and direction, shaping projects, attracting world-class residents, and ensuring the work aligns with Maincode’s long-term goals. This is a full-time, permanent role based in Australia.

What you’ll do

• Lead Maincode's AI Residency Program end-to-end, setting its direction and ensuring high-impact outcomes

• Attract and evaluate outstanding researchers to join the residency program, ensuring the highest level of research talent

• Shape and approve research projects, balancing novelty with strategic alignment

• Provide scientific mentorship and intellectual guidance to residents, enabling them to pursue ambitious research projects and produce impactful publications.

• Promote Maincode’s research externally, representing us at conferences and industry events

• Build relationships with universities, industry labs, and the broader AI research community to grow the program’s reach and attract top talent

• Collaborate closely with Maincode’s core research team to ensure residency projects complement and extend our own agenda

Who you are

• Deeply versed in AI research, with strong technical grounding and an intuitive sense for promising ideas and directions

• Experienced in supervising and leading researchers, such as PhD students or postdocs, and comfortable guiding multiple projects simultaneously

• Confident evaluating research quality and spotting high-potential candidates and projects

• Comfortable representing Maincode externally and building new connections across academia and industry

• Excited to move beyond academic constraints and make an impact where cutting-edge AI research is increasingly happening: in industry

• A confident communicator who thrives at the intersection of research, engineering, and external engagement

• Highly autonomous and comfortable taking ownership of a strategically important program

Why Maincode

We are a small, mission-driven team building some of the most advanced AI systems in Australia. We operate our own GPU clusters, run large-scale training, and work closely across research and engineering to push the frontier of what’s possible.

You’ll be surrounded by people who:

• Care deeply about model internals, not just outputs

• Build things that work at scale

• Take pride in learning, experimenting, and shipping

• Believe Australia must have independent, world-class AI systems

If you want to lead a program that empowers world-class researchers to test ideas at scale and shape the future of AI science, we’d love to hear from you.