---
title: 'Head of GTM at FirstPrinciples'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-gtm-firstprinciples-ontario-j3m84whrjckh'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Head of GTM at FirstPrinciples

- **Company:** FirstPrinciples
- **Location:** Ontario, Canada
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-08-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/firstprinciples/360dd4a3-aaf7-4a45-aa79-5c5e884a9e26

## Job description

## About FirstPrinciples

FirstPrinciples is building AI to accelerate scientific discovery. Our core product is the Theo Platform, a research environment built to help researchers iterate faster, validate rigorously, and reach verified results they can trust. We're a fast-growing, remote-first team of builders, researchers, engineers, and thinkers working across Canada, the US, the UK, and expanding globally. What brings us together is a shared curiosity about how the universe works, and a belief that we can build systems that help us explore it more effectively. We spend our time working on questions that don't have clear answers, like how to design AI that can reason through scientific problems, and how the scientific process as a whole might evolve. This is work that sits somewhere between creativity and rigorous thinking, and often requires comfort with ambiguity and iteration. If you're someone who enjoys tackling big, abstract problems and exploring ideas that don't yet have a defined path forward, you'll likely find the work here interesting.

Why This Role Exists: We're building products to accelerate progress in physics but their impact depends on our ability to bring them to market, earn the trust of researchers and institutions, and turn breakthrough technology into meaningful adoption and sustainable commercial growth.

The Head of GTM will own that challenge. You'll help define and build our go-to-market strategy from the ground up, determining who we serve, how we reach them, how we position and sell our products, and how we create a repeatable path from initial interest to adoption and revenue.

You'll work across the full GTM lifecycle while building the systems, processes, messaging, partnerships, and eventually the team required to scale. Your impact will directly shape our commercial strategy, customer relationships, and how quickly FirstPrinciples turns scientific innovation into widespread adoption and a durable business.

What You’ll Do:

- Help build the commercial function from the ground up, continuously testing and refining our ICP, messaging, sales process, and go-to-market motion based on what you learn in the market
- Define and own our go-to-market strategy and build relationships and pipeline across commercial R&D teams, industry researchers, research groups, national laboratories, and other emerging customer segments
- Own the end-to-end commercial lifecycle: from prospecting and qualification, to discovery, demos, proposals, and close
- Personally lead strategic outreach and early customer development while building repeatable approaches for reaching physicists and research leaders
- Run technically credible discovery conversations and product demos that connect researchers’ goals to concrete product use cases
- Help prospective customers structure pilot plans, establish success criteria, and build confidence in adopting the platform
- Navigate multiple stakeholders across scientific, technical, administrative, procurement, and leadership functions
- Define and build the systems for outreach, qualification, account planning, CRM management, forecasting, and pipeline management that will underpin a scalable commercial organization
- Work closely with Research Partners to create a strong handoff from commercial agreement to onboarding, successful usage, and long-term adoption
- Bring market feedback, objections, and emerging use cases back to product, research, and engineering
- Own clear pipeline, conversion, and revenue goals while helping define our early sales playbook
- Partner with leadership on ICP definition, positioning, packaging, pricing, and broader go-to-market priorities

Who You Are:

- Excited to build a commercial function from the ground up rather than inherit an established team, process, or playbook
- Strong background in physics or a closely related scientific field (A background in physics, or a related scientific field)
- Genuinely interested in commercial work and motivated by helping scientific products reach the researchers who can benefit from them
- Comfortable initiating conversations, prospecting into new organizations, and building relationships from the ground up
- Able to understand complex research goals and translate technical capabilities into clear, credible value
- Experience building or leading an early-stage go-to-market, enterprise sales, business development, scientific commercialization, or similarly complex commercial motion
- Strong communicator who can lead discovery conversations, present compelling demonstrations, and move opportunities toward a decision
- Persistent and highly organized, you follow through, maintain momentum, and are comfortable being accountable for measurable commercial outcomes

## About FirstPrinciples

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: FirstPrinciples is a non-profit, AI-first research organization building an autonomous AI Physicist to accelerate fundamental physics discovery and advance humanity’s understanding of nature.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Non-profit) – funded by philanthropic grants (e.g., John Templeton Foundation)
- **Headquarters**: Toronto, Canada
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Ildar Shar

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Research Services / AI / Fundamental Physics
- **Target customers**: The scientific community and research institutions (B2 science); operates as a mission-driven open-science platform, not a commercial vendor.
- **Mission**: To unlock the transformative potential of fundamental science by building an open, autonomous research engine (the AI Physicist) that can generate and test novel theoretical frameworks – with a goal of unifying quantum field theory and general relativity by 2035.

## Products & Services
- **Theo (AI Physicist)**: An open-source, autonomous research engine that combines AI, symbolic reasoning, and self-directed research capabilities to explore theoretical physics and produce novel insights.
- **FirstPrinciples Fellowship Program**: A fixed-term, fully remote program for PhD/postdoctoral researchers in ML and physics to build core modules of the AI Physicist and help establish open scientific infrastructure.
- **Theo Collaborators Program**: A selective research collaboration that brings expert physicists into direct engagement with Theo to evaluate and improve its scientific reasoning.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Funding**: Not applicable (non‑profit). Received a philanthropic grant from the **John Templeton Foundation** – early institutional support for the AI Physicist.
- **Key Metric**: 27 employees (as of mid‑2026), with **140% year‑over-year headcount growth**; 7,042 LinkedIn followers.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: John Templeton Foundation; Scientific Advisory Board includes **Victor Galitski** (inaugural member) and **Yang-Hui He** (mathematical physicist).
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid team expansion (140% YoY), launch of Fellowship Program (January 2026), fully remote global operations with presence in Canada, US, and Belgium.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Mission‑driven, non‑profit, open‑source** model attracts top AI and physics talent who want impact over profit.
- **Long‑term vision** (2035 breakthrough) combined with startup‑like speed and iteration.
- **Unique interdisciplinary approach** – merges cutting‑edge AI with rigorous theoretical physics, guided by a world‑class Scientific Advisory Board.
- **Autonomous research loops** that go beyond data analysis to actively generate and test new scientific ideas.

## Strategic Focus
- Building and scaling the AI Physicist to achieve a breakthrough in fundamental physics (unification of QFT & GR).
- Expanding the research community through fellowships and collaborative programs (Theo Collaborators).
- Developing open scientific infrastructure and establishing new standards for AI‑driven discovery.
- Deepening collaborations with leading physicists and institutions.

## Why Work Here
- **Remote‑first culture** – a global collective where engineers, physicists, and AI researchers collaborate asynchronously.
- **Startup energy with non‑profit purpose** – fast iteration, low hierarchy, and direct impact on science.
- **Flexible work** – primarily remote; some hybrid options in Toronto.
- **Notable perks** (from careers page): fully remote positions available, entrepreneurial environment, and the chance to work on one of the most ambitious AI‑science projects today.
- **Roles available** (as of mid‑2026): MTS in DevOps/Infrastructure, Engineering, Research; Staff Physicist (Quantum Information); Training Engineer (Large Scale Foundation Models); Human‑AI Interaction Designer; Strategic Partnerships Manager; etc.

## Sources
1. [greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/firstprinciples)
2. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/firstprinciples-foundation)
3. [linkedin.com](https://ca.linkedin.com/company/firstprinciplesfoundation)
4. [firstprinciples.org – Press](https://www.firstprinciples.org/press)
5. [firstprinciples.org – Fellowship announcement](https://www.firstprinciples.org/article/firstprinciples-launches-fellowship-program-for-researchers-in-ai-and-physics)

## Other roles at FirstPrinciples

- [Member of Product Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-product-staff-firstprinciples-ontario-hrcj4668abr0) — Ontario, Canada
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