--- title: 'Operations Associate at Pluralis Research' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/operations-associate-pluralis-research-melbourne-7w6xwzx7zp0q' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-14' --- # Operations Associate at Pluralis Research - **Company:** Pluralis Research - **Location:** Melbourne, Australia - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-09-11 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pluralis-research/675d2773-414c-4d74-8f36-7b527b1875cf ## Job description [Pluralis Research](https://pluralis.ai/) is pioneering [Protocol Learning](https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07890), a fully decentralised way to train and deploy AI models that opens this layer to individuals rather than well resourced corporates. By pooling compute from many participants, incentivising their efforts, and preventing any single party from controlling a model's full weights, we're creating a genuinely open, collaborative path to frontier-scale AI. As our Operations Associate, you'll be the person who makes things happen behind the scenes. You'll coordinate the meetings, dinners, travel and events our CEO runs with investors, partners, researchers and candidates, and you'll keep the administrative machinery running. This is a hands-on, execution-first role working directly with our CEO and Chief of Staff. It is the best possible entry point into an AI startup for someone early in their career who is organised, fast and wants exposure to every part of the business. You'll start with coordination and admin and build up to owning your own operational projects. ## Responsibilities - Support CEO's external engagements: Set up meetings, calls, dinners and hosted sessions with the investors, partners, researchers and candidates he wants to meet. - Travel and logistics: Book and manage travel for the CEO and the team across Australia and the US, including conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR and beyond) and team offsites. - Events support: Work with the Events & Operations Associate and Chief of Staff on offsites, conference presence, our Tech Talks series and hosted dinners. Own the logistics list and the follow-through. - Team administration: Run the admin that keeps the business moving: onboarding new starters, equipment and tooling requests, expense and invoice processing, vendor set-up, document formatting and polish, and keeping our records in Notion and Google Drive tidy and current. - Building Systems: We are an agent-first company and we expect you to use AI tools daily. We want to build systems that can do the work. ## What You'll Bring - 2 - 5 years in an administrative, coordination, executive support or operations role. - You’ve worked within a funded startup environment at Seed, Series A or B stages or within Venture Capital or Private Equity. - Proven work supporting an executive team and general operations - Proven work experience coordinating events - You write in clear, written english that is crafted by you - not an LLM - Confident in Google Workspace. Comfortable with Notion, Linear and Slack or Zulip, or able to pick them up in a week. Already using AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT or similar) in how you work. - Comfortable working across multiple timezones with some early or late calls to coordinate with the US. ## Nice to Have - Exposure to AI, deep tech, research or crypto communities. - Experience supporting a founder or executive directly. - Event coordination experience across multiple countries. - Examples of how you've used AI tools to automate part of your own workload. ## Compensation & Benefits - Competitive base salary. - Remote-first culture with a regular cadence of team offsites and the opportunity to travel to the US. - Direct access to the CEO and Chief of Staff and exposure to every function of the business. FYI's - This role is only open to candidates with full working rights, based in Australia. - Applicants must have professional-level English proficiency (written and spoken). - Pluralis is a remote team across Australia and the US. You'll need to be comfortable working across time zones and collaborating with a diverse, distributed group. - Recruiters: we aren't looking for agency support at this time. We'll reach out if we need help. Backed by [Union Square Ventures](https://www.usv.com/) and other tier-1 investors, we're a world-class, deeply technical team of ML researchers. Pluralis is unapologetically ideological. We view the world as a better place if we are able to implement what we are attempting, and Protocol Learning as the only plausible approach to preventing a handful of massive corporations monopolising model development, access and release, and achieving massive economic capture. If this resonates, please apply. ## About Pluralis Research ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Pluralis Research is developing protocol learning to enable decentralized, collectively-owned and collaboratively-trained frontier AI models that are unextractable and operate over open, permissionless networks. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: Alexander Long (Founder and CEO); Founding Scientists include Ajanthan Thalaiyasingam, Gil Avraham, and Sameera Ramasinghe. ## Core Business - **Primary Industry**: Foundational AI Research (Decentralized AI / Protocol Learning) - **Target Customers**: B2B (research institutions, compute providers, open-source community contributors); B2C indirectly (future users of collectively owned models) - **Mission/Purpose**: To create a third path for AI development beyond closed-source models and open-weight models—a self-sustaining, collectively owned ecosystem where models are trained and governed by a community, not a single corporation. ## Products & Services - **Protocol Learning (Core Protocol)**: A novel training paradigm where large AI models are split across geographically separated devices connected only by standard internet links. - **Type**: Research Protocol / Decentralized Infrastructure - **Key Innovation**: Models exist only within the protocol, not on any single device. They are trainable and usable but **unextractable**, preventing any single entity from capturing the model weights. - **Node0**: A collaborative event powered by Protocol Learning, enabling decentralized AI training runs. - **Type**: Open-source tool / Event Framework - **Agora**: A collaborative training library for multi-participant model training. - **Type**: Open-source Library (GitHub) - **AsyncPP & AsyncMesh**: Communication-efficient pipeline and mesh parallelism techniques for scaling decentralized models over low-bandwidth networks (achieving >95% compression and matching centralized wall-clock convergence). - **Type**: Open-source Algorithms (GitHub) ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed - **Total Funding**: $8.6 million - **Non-Equity Assistance** (Nov 2025): $1.0M led by Amazon Web Services - **Pre-Seed Round** (Jan 2025): Led by CoinFund - **Seed Round** (Mar 2025): $7.6M co-led by Union Square Ventures and CoinFund, with participation from Topology, Variant, Eden Block, and Bodhi Ventures. Angel investors include Balaji Srinivasan and Clem Delangue (co-founder of Hugging Face). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Union Square Ventures, CoinFund, Amazon Web Services, Balaji Srinivasan, Clem Delangue (Hugging Face) - **Growth Signals**: - Headcount grew **+100% YoY** (from ~7 to 17 employees). - Published multiple papers at **NeurIPS 2025** on decentralized training (e.g., Subspace Networks, Mixtures of Subspaces). - 10 active job openings across Research, ML Engineering, and Distributed Systems. - Team has deep FAANG/Anthropic pedigree (Google, Amazon, Oracle, Atlassian alumni). ## Competitive Advantages - **Technical Moat (Unextractable Models)**: Their core IP ensures model weights are never materialized on any participant's device, preventing theft or centralization even during training. - **Economic Moat (Self-Sustaining Economics)**: The protocol allows value to flow programmatically to contributors, solving the financial sustainability problem that plagues purely open-weight models. - **Published Research**: Validated by acceptance at NeurIPS 2025, demonstrating academic credibility and technical rigor. - **Talent Density**: The team comprises PhD researchers who previously worked together at top AI labs (Anthropic, Google, Amazon), with deep expertise in distributed systems and ML. ## Strategic Focus - **Hiring in All Areas**: Currently recruiting across Research, ML Training Platforms, and Distributed ML Systems to accelerate protocol scaling. - **Scaling Decentralized Networks**: Aiming to prove that model-parallel training over low-bandwidth (30Mbps) internet is feasible for billion-parameter models. - **Building Community**: Opening participation in training runs to external contributors, moving toward a truly permissionless network. ## Why Work Here - **Culture of Radical Openness**: The mission is to democratize AI ownership. Work here is published openly, and researchers contribute to a public good. - **High Impact, Small Team**: With only 17 people, every hire has an outsized influence on shaping the protocol and company direction. - **Research First**: The team is PhD-heavy and publishes at top-tier conferences (NeurIPS). The environment is scholarly and technically deep. - **Remote-Flexible (Hybrid)**: Presence in San Francisco (US) and Australia (largest cohort of 12 employees). The job postings do not mandate 5 days in-office; distributed collaboration is core to the product itself. - **Top-Tier Investor Backing**: Backed by USV and CoinFund, providing strong financial runway and network effects in both the AI and crypto/Web3 ecosystems. - **Founding Team Pedigree**: Work alongside former researchers from Anthropic, Google, and Amazon, creating a steep learning curve for ML engineers and scientists. ## Sources 1. [pluralis.ai](https://pluralis.ai/) 2. [LinkedIn - Pluralis Research](https://www.linkedin.com/company/pluralis-research) 3. [GlobeNewswire - Seed Round Announcement](https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/19/3045635/0/en/Pluralis-Research-Pioneers-Protocol-Learning-to-Scale-Decentralized-AI-Announces-7-6M-Seed-Round-Led-by-USV-and-CoinFund.html) 4. [GitHub - Pluralis Research](https://github.com/PluralisResearch) 5. [Jobs.ashbyhq.com - Pluralis Research Careers](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/pluralis-research) ## Other roles at Pluralis Research - [Executive Assistant](https://feeny.ai/job/executive-assistant-pluralis-research-sydney-w4jd5shemgqs) — Sydney, Australia - [Machine Learning Engineer - ML Training Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-ml-training-platform-pluralis-research-usa-or-cb0b1g58vsjh) — Usa OR, Australia - [Research Engineer Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-intern-pluralis-research-australia-62bya07kzppe) — Australia - [Research Scientist Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-intern-pluralis-research-usa-or-gc7q96xt6kh1) — Usa OR, Australia - [Research Engineer - Decentralized Training and Inference Verification](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-decentralized-training-and-inference-verification-pluralis-7gw1639gefck) — Usa OR, Australia - [Research Engineer - Geo-Distributed Inference](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-geo-distributed-inference-pluralis-research-usa-or-gk4y7fqhyk80) — Usa OR, Australia - [Research Engineer - Post-Training](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-post-training-pluralis-research-usa-or-dvzaxxpvrv0x) — Usa OR, Australia - [Research Engineer - Pre-training](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-pre-training-pluralis-research-usa-or-55zxjrp2f7s5) — Usa OR, Australia - [Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-pluralis-research-usa-or-v7z1rqs3sas3) — Usa OR, Australia - [Academic Collaboration](https://feeny.ai/job/academic-collaboration-pluralis-research-sydney-kwpagzyta862) — Sydney, Australia