Senior ML Researcher (Spectrum)

About the Role

Software engineers and AI agents alike suffer from the same problem: finding that one person or place that will answer their tough, specific question. Many solutions promise to solve this with similarity search in vector databases. Unfortunately, finding the answer is often a puzzle with pieces to be collected across a myriad of contradictory sources and cannot be solved without surgical search and careful reasoning.

Spectrum collects data from an organization's code, docs, and issues, and organizes knowledge in a unified ontology that AI agents can efficiently search through and reason over. We aim to revolutionize the semantic layer space for software-building organizations and move beyond specs that fall out of sync with code, introducing a living spec – one that's extracted from the whole system and used to keep it aligned. Spectrum is meant to be the single source of truth for all product and architectural knowledge.

A resident of JetBrains' startup incubator, Spectrum enjoys startup speed and autonomy, and is backed by 25 years of developer tooling expertise. We are looking for a Senior ML Researcher to develop the core methods that make Spectrum possible – novel approaches to temporal ontology extraction, contradiction detection, and semantic alignment across heterogeneous software artifacts. You will help define and execute the research agenda, while also collaborating with JetBrains Research and external academic advisors.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Developing methods for LLM-based ontology construction from code, documentation, and issue trackers, including contradiction detection and reasoning over the resulting knowledge graph.
• Creating datasets, metrics, and benchmarks that drive measurable improvements across the system.
• Prototyping and validating research ideas, then collaborating with ML and software engineers to bring them to production.
• Collaborating with JetBrains Research and external academic advisors to shape our research agenda.
• Publishing research findings at top venues and representing Spectrum in the research community.

We expect you to have:

• A PhD (or equivalent research experience) in NLP, knowledge graphs, ontology learning, information extraction, or a closely related field.
• A strong publication record in at least one of the following areas: knowledge graph construction, ontology learning, information extraction, or NLP.
• Experience applying LLMs to structured knowledge extraction tasks.
• Experience designing and running rigorous experiments, including hypothesis formulation, ablation studies, and statistical evaluation.
• Strong Python and PyTorch skills, with the ability to implement research ideas from scratch.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Proficiency in English, both written and verbal.

Our ideal candidate would also have:

• Experience with ontology engineering, semantic web technologies (OWL, RDF, SPARQL), or ontology alignment.
• A background in code analysis, developer tools, or software engineering research.
• Experience with knowledge graph embedding methods or graph neural networks.
• Experience in early-stage startups – you enjoy the zero-to-one phase.
• Actively contributed to relevant open-source projects.

What we offer:

• A competitive salary and JetBrains benefits.
• A generous runway and corporate resources with startup autonomy.
• Full support for publishing ML research and attending industry conferences.
• Collaboration with JetBrains Research and external academic advisors in the knowledge graph and ontology learning community.
• A motivated team that moves fast, with short feedback loops, rapid prototyping, and lots of ownership.
• A rare applied research role where your methods ship in a real product used by software teams.